Amazon Kindle Fire HD vs Google Nexus 7

BATTERY LIFE
Amazon claims the Kindle Fire HD will last up to “11 hours of watching videos, browsing the web, playing music, or reading”, and until we get one in the building we can’t prove them otherwise. We don’t know the capacity of the battery either, although the original Kindle Fire used a 4,400mAh model so we would expect to see something similar here.

The Nexus 7 has a 4,326mAh battery, which lasted ten hours and twenty minutes in our video loop test. This suggests there won’t be a lot between the two tablets in terms of battery life, although the Kindle has a chance to come out on top if its dual-core processor is more energy efficient than Nvidia’s Tegra 3.
Winner: Google Nexus 7 – for now

AUDIO
Google’s tablet has a pair of stereo speakers, which are located at the bottom of the tablet and fire audio downwards. It doesn’t create much of a stereo effect as they are located so close together.

Amazon one-ups the Nexus in this department, as the Kindle Fire HD has four speakers arranged in a 2×2 layout at either side of the tablet. This should not only help create louder, more balanced audio, but create a more believable stereo sound scape too.,
Winner: Kindle Fire HD

CAMERA
Amazon has yet to reveal the number of megapixels the Kindle Fire HD’s front-facing camera has, only saying it’s an “HD” model. Most likely it will be a 1.2-megapixel snapper that’s best suited to Skype video conversations rather than taking pictures.

We know the Nexus 7 has a 1.2-megapixel front webcam, which again isn’t particularly well suited to taking photos. There’s not even a dedicated camera app installed, so you would need to find one on the Google Play store if you were really determined. It does however work well for video calls.
Winner: tie

OPERATING SYSTEM
Both tablets use Google’s Android operating system, but in vastly different ways. The Nexus 7 is a completely vanilla Android experience, with none of the custom skins or interfaces you normally see from smartphone manufacturers. It’s also running the latest 4.1 version, otherwise known as Jelly Bean. It’s a major upgrade over Ice Cream Sandwich, thanks to a reworked animation engine that makes everything appear much smoother and responsive than on previous versions of Android.

Amazon uses Android 4.0 as a base for its custom interface, with a heavily modified custom overlay on top. It’s much more geared towards Amazon’s own content stores, but is also far more user-friendly for anyone that’s never picked up an Android tablet before.
Winner: Google Nexus 7