Today Amazon announced the upcoming release of a new Fire HD 8 tablet, except it’s pretty much exactly the same as the last Fire HD 8.
In fact the only real noteworthy change seems to be that addition of hands-free Alexa support, which was previously only available on the Fire HD 10. With the older HD 8 the device had to be plugged in or the screen had to be on for hands-free Alexa to work.
The only other notable difference is estimated battery life has gone down from up to 12 hours to 10 hours.
Most of the listed specs remain the same as before, except the new version supports microSD cards up to 400GB (previously 256GB) and it has a 2MP front camera instead of VGA.
The dimensions are identical, but the weight has gone down 6 grams.
The price for the HD 8 still starts at $79 for 16GB with ads, and it still only has a 90-day warranty. Like before, it’s available in black, yellow, red, and blue.
The new 8th gen Fire HD 8 is expected to get released on October 4th. They also have a new Fire HD 8 Kids Edition to go along with it for $129.
Too bad they didn’t at least upgrade the screen resolution to make it better for reading.
It’s pretty pathetic when they only add one new model to their lineup all year and then they only add one new feature. What a boring year from Amazon with no new Kindles expected and nothing remotely interesting on the horizon.
Well if they didn’t announce a new Kindle e-reader today than that pretty much sums it up. No new Paperwhite this year. Damn shame..
How does this sum up anything? Just last year, Amazon released the Oasis 2 in October.
Indeed. The two aren’t related. But if they don’t annouce something within the next 6 weeks it’s not happening until 2019.
What do you think — Is that ‘loss’ of battery life a real thing… or merely a more sober reassessment of the what the existing HD8’s true battery life has been all along? …I own both previous versions of the HD8, but I could really, really use hands free Alexis. THANKS, anyone!
It’s hard telling since they don’t list the size of the battery, but it’s probably the same as before. Having Alexa active and listening while in sleep mode might drain the battery more.
Amazon stating the battery life is 10 hours is still overly optomistic.
My wife has one and she hates it for the battery life and how slow it runs even with the Wi-Fi off. It has 32GB.
I can’t imagine using this as an E-reader, it’s just too heavy and the apect ratio sucks!
I’m not in the market for a new Fire right now since my ancient one still works – honestly I prefer some of the features of the older models more, even if older and worse battery life – but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of upgrades in newer models. Eventually I will need a new fire but Amazon doesn’t seem to be working much on improving them. I could care less about Alexa, and since they have spent all year trying to push that product, this updated Fire with the Alexa feature is probably more about selling more Alexas than anything else.