Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsOne of the best tablets for the price
Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2023
I already own multiple iPads and higher end Android tablets. Why did I end up buying the Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus and give it a 5 star rating?
This tablet simply exceeded my expectations.
I was in the market for a smaller lighter tablet to read books and manga. As good as my other tablets are, they are not easy to hold for multiple hours of reading. Holding a metal and glass tablet with a 10.6 inch screen gets tiring over a few hours.
The screen on this Amazon tablet is more than adequate for reading books from the Kindle app. This is near perfect for manga since the screen size is similar to paper manga. Images and text appear nice and clear.
Installing the Google Play store was easy. I need apps like Google Home, Keep, Drive, and GBoard. YouTube works just fine.
My use case is rather easy to handle. I let my kids test this tablet. If it can keep up with my kids, then it can handle what I need a tablet for.
When I handed this off to my kids, they just went overboard on games. They couldn't find all of the games they play in the Amazon shop store, so I'll be referencing some games from the Google Play store.
Roblox is a popular app for my kids. The overall performance was good. It really depends on which game they are playing from Roblox. Piggy ran well. Broken Bones was very jittery but playable. Yeet-a-friend plays well if you disable some of the extra options for the game itself. Cookie Swirl C World is playable, but was not the smoothest. Spray Paint played well. Spider also played well. Random OBEEs splayed well.
Here is the pattern I noticed with Roblox. If the game supports a large lobby, then there is a greater chance that the game runs a bit slower. I noticed that the large lobby games are running a bit slow, but my kids didn't care. They were still happily playing and winning without issues.
Granny Chapter 1 and 2 play well.
Gacha Life and Gacha Club ran well.
Among Us ran well.
They were playing more games, but I couldn't keep up with their long list.
Overall, this tablet can run games well enough. It won't be as smooth as a higher end tablet, but I didn't notice any random crashes. My kids would have definitely complained about it. If you are considering this tablet for your kids to play games, you need to consider which games they are playing.
Surprisingly TikTok worked well. When swiping through videos, it may take a second to load before it plays. I don't notice that issue on my other tablets. After the initial pause, the videos play well.
Since reading and productivity were my main concern, it's a 5 star tablet for the price. Games are just the icing on the cake. Since I don't play them often it would not have been a concern for me. Now I have another device to hand off to my kids in those just in case situations.
