Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 7″ review

AMAZON KINDLE FIRE HDX 7 FIRE OS

Although the Kindle technically runs Android, it’s a heavily customised and modified version, which Amazon calls Fire OS. The HDX 7″ runs the latest version, Fire OS 3.0 Mojito, which is based on Android 4.2.2. It’s quite neat in a lot of ways, with some nice touches. For example, as soon as you buy one, it turns up already linked to your Amazon account and credit card, so there’s very little you need to do in order to start using it.

Gone is any real indication that you’re running Android, with a completely new front end that’s hooked into Amazon’s services. The main screen is comprised of a carousel that shows you recently used documents, books, music, videos and apps. You can remove things from the carousel, but you can’t stop it automatically being populated. Underneath is a launcher for your apps.

For everything else you need to use categories, which run across the top of the screen. Each category is linked to the relevant Amazon service. Tap Videos, for example, and you can watch all of your Lovefilm content; Music pulls in all of the music from your Amazon Cloud player, where you can stream music or even download them to your tablet. Of course, Kindle books are tightly integrated, so you can read all of your purchases on your tablet.

We like the way that each category has two tabs. The cloud tab shows you everything you’ve purchased; the on device tab shows you what you’ve actually downloaded to the Kindle Fire HDX, or have copied via a USB cable. Then there are links to the relevant store, so you can pop on to Amazon and buy extra content.

Amazon’s added some neat features, too. X-ray is one of the best. In books it lets you find passages from a book related to the person, idea or topic you’re interested in. In films it integrates with IMDB, letting you get more information about the actors onscreen, including finding other movies they’re in that are available for you to stream. X-ray now has a Music mode for films, too, so you can see all of the tracks used in the production, buy them from Amazon or jump straight to the scene that they’re used in. For Fire OS 3.0, Amazon now has X-ray built into some music tracks. For enabled tracks, when you hit play you get lyrics onscreen. In terms of organisation with Amazon services, the Kindle Fire HDX is really rather clever. It gives you everything you want, neatly in one place.

X-ray is especially great for movie trivia fans, copy protection cuts out the movie when you screenshot it

New to this version is the Mayday button, which connects you to Amazon tech support over the internet. You get to see the person you’re talking to, but they can’t see you, just your device’s screen. They can highlight items on your screen, to help show you how to deal with a problem. Amazon hopes to answer all calls with 15 seconds and we certainly weren’t waiting long when we tried the service. We had to be put on hold a couple of times, while the advisor looked for an answer to our problems, but they were helpful and friendly. If you’re pretty techy, this feature probably won’t be much use, but if you’re not, it’ll be a godsend.

Get live help with onscreen prompting with the new Mayday feature

As a forked version of Android, you don’t get the same control as with a ‘pure’ Android tablet. Amazon installs some basic apps for email, contacts and your calendar, but you miss out on the stock Google defaults, such as Maps and Gmail. There’s also no Google Play store, with the Amazon App store replacing it. You’ll find most of the big names in there, including BBC iPlayer and Facebook, but it doesn’t have the breadth of Google’s own store and it doesn’t stock any Google Apps.

You can get round this problem by side-loading apps, provided you can find the relevant APK. It’s not overtly difficult if you know what you’re doing, but it’s a bit annoying that you can’t get everything through the Amazon store.

The Silk browser is a little harder to forgive, replacing Chrome. It doesn’t support any of Chrome’s synchronisation, so you can’t share tabs, usernames and passwords across multiple devices. It’s also more restrictive in Google, bringing up the basic mobile page, rather than the touch-designed tablet version of the search engine. It’s also not as smooth as Chrome, getting a little jerky at times, particularly when browsing complicated pages. It’s far from a disaster, but Chrome’s a better browser and if you can side load it, you should.