With a 2GHz Mediatek MT8168A chipset and 2GB of RAM, the tablet offers unimpressive benchmark performance. It scored 4448 in the PCMark Work 2.0 benchmark and 101.32 in the Basemark Web browsing benchmark, both comparable to a low-end smartphone. The Fire HD 10 scores 50% faster in web benchmarks. Performance is a bit slow. The user interface is designed to work well on this tablet, but you may notice that scrolling through complex pages gets a bit slow. This is not an unusable experience, but it is definitely low-end. The games are a mix. One old action game, Asphalt 8, played smoothly, while another, Riptide GP 2, suffered a noticeable drop in frames; on the Fire HD 10 it worked fine. Children’s games, such as the Toca Boca series, did well. We streamed the amateur pastry show Nailed It on Netflix, and the contestants’ hilarious miscreations were revealed in all their ghastly colorful glory. The picture unfolds remarkably smoothly, even as one contestant frantically presses the panic button as his celebratory dinosaur-shaped cake collapses. There is a brief moment of noise when the gun shoots money around the winning contestant, but overall this is a competent performance. It is also a broad presentation, with excellent separation when a baby blue whale emerges from the depths in the left ear and calls to its mother, whose response is heard through the right. We cannot fully endorse the Fire HD 8’s Dolby Atmos claims-after all, a tablet’s small speakers can only offer three-dimensional audio-but it is still a good-sounding tablet for this price. If you are looking for an Android tablet on which to download TV shows, movies or books for a road trip, or an Alexa-enabled device for answering questions hands-free and so on, we don’t think the Fire HD 8 can be improved upon for this price.
