Fire HD 10 Review

Today we're gonna be taking a look at the 2019 Amazon fire HD 10. This is the newest offering from Amazon and their tablet line up and they promised 30% percent performance improvements over the last fire HD 10 which I personally kinda liked. on paper they have made some really nice improvements like adding an eight core two gigahertz CPU and upgrading fire OS to 7.3 which is based on android 9.0. Now as a lot of you might know these are android tablets but they don't come pre loaded with the Google play store but it's very easy to add it and it does work on the 2019 fire HD 10. 

Inside of the box you're obviously going to receive the tablet itself your wall charger and USB type C cable, that's right they have added USB type C to this unit here it's only for charging it will not work with HDMI out but they have included a 9 watt wall charger. So taking a look around the tab on the very top we have our power button, our USB type C for charging and a spot for a microphone or headphone Jack and a volume rocker. Over on the right hand side we do have an SD card slot this is good up to a 512 gigabyte card. This tablet also contains dual stereo speakers and it also does Dolby right out of the box and it sounds really good when comparing this to the 2017 version of the HD fire 10. It's the exact same size as the exact same thickness we just have more powerful internals.

Value

It's pretty good for a hundred fifty dollar tablet for the CPU we have the media tech 8183, this is an octa core CPU 4x A53 cores at two gigahertz and 4x 73 cores at 2 gegahurts. The GPU is the Mali G73 MP3 this is a tri core GPU up to a 150 megahertz and it does support Vulkan and luckily it is baked into the operating system unfortunately they haven't added any more ram in this variant we still get two gigs and I believe it's running LPDDR4. it looks like it is from the benchmarks I ran. For the display we have a 10.1 inch 1920 by 1200 the display looks great the DPI isn't the highest at 224 but the price really reflects that there are two storage variants of the HD 10 32 and 64 gigabyte but they both have a micro SD card slot and that's good up to 512 gigabytes 802.11 dual band AC wifi Bluetooth 4.2. It has a 4700 milli amp hour battery and they claim up to twelve hours of battery life and finally the operating system it's running fire OS 7.3 and this is based on android 9.0.

BenchMarks

So the first thing I always like to do with these new devices is run some benchmarks and I really want to compare this to the older 2017 version of the HD 10 to see if we're really getting that 30 percent increase in performance. So the first benchmark I ran with geekbench 4. The single core score on the 2019 was 1382, multi core 5137, if we compare this with the old 2017 model we got a 16 percent increase in single core performance but a 132 percent increase in multi core. Moving over to the GPU side of things using 3Dmark sling shot extreme, now like I mentioned the new model does support Vulkan so I was able to run the Vulkan test here. OpenGL 3.1 1131 on the old model 438 so we also have a really nice GPU performance bomb. And finally antutu, now I had to run an older antutu seven benchmark because that was the only one that would work on both of these but we'll get a good idea here on the new model total score 121415 on the older 2107 model 68542 and the new 2019 model did come ahead of the 2017 model and all of the test run inside of into two.

Media

So the overall user experience on this tablet isn't bad at all it's pretty quick to process everything that you want to do. Amazon definitely touts this as a media device for you to Netflix Hulu and their Amazon prime and it does that quite well it's got those dual stereo speakers sounds pretty good. And this big bright 10.1 inch screen so if you're looking to buy one of these to watch movies and videos on the go it's a really great option and it's very inexpensive for what it is. Just keep in mind without installing Google play you will be limited to the apps that are on the Amazon app store or apps that you cited some of those won't work because when we install Google play will have to install Google services which will allow us to access Google. So as a media consumption device is actually pretty decent tablet we have Hulu. Netflix Amazon video HBO all those apps can be installed from the Amazon app store or sideload it.

Gaming

But what about gaming no I didn't stalk of the play on here but I want to test a couple games that are available on the Amazon app store so first up we have minecraft. And it definitely works great on this tablet now this is a very well optimized game it works on a lot of lower end android devices this the pocket edition from the Amazon app store. I also test out rooablocks because I know a lot of people be buying these for their kids and roadblocks also works great. 
Moving over to a more graphically intense games this is asphalt 9 and I do notice some frame rate drops when the effects come in on screen you'll see it stutter a bit. There will be issues with a few higher end games since I have Google play installed on this I figured I'd go ahead and install call of duty mobile in PUBG. I really wanted to see if we can run these on here and to my surprise on the lowest graphic settings with call of duty mobile and highest frame rate it actually runs quite well and I definitely need to get used to using this bigger screen rather than on my phone with a much smaller screen. but it does work. 

Performance is much better than I thought it would be. So naturally since call of duty mobile is working I figured I'd go ahead and test out PUBG. I have it set to the lowest graphical setting but the highest framerate. I know we're not getting 60 FPS from here but I wanted to see how far we could push it. It's definitely not a smooth as call of duty mobile but it is playable.

It's time for my favorite part emulation, we're gonna be testing out some dream casting PSP. For dreamcast we are using the redream emulator, I am upscale to 280 by 960, unfortunately this GPU does not support OpenGL ES 3.2 but that's totally fine a lot of these emulators don't use it anyway I'll also be using the Xbox one controller connected over Bluetooth. So I know for a fact that the 2017 version of the HD fire 10 would not run the emulator at all, It was super slow, here we're getting close full emulation with upscaling which is pretty awesome in the original soul Calibur and happens to be the best version for Dreamcast. One more for Dreamcast upscale is canon spike, yes Marvel versus Capcom team will run on this device. PSP emulator also works great with a lot of different games when we sent it 2X. resolution. Tekken 6 unfortunately higher end games for PSP are harder to emulate, games won't run well on this one. like god of war chains of Olympus Killzone for midnight club double vision.

so there's lots of retro games that are gonna be playable on this but just don't expect to run the dolphin emulator on a $150 tablet, In the end it's a welcome upgrade from the 2017 version I really wish they would have added an extra gig of ram or even a half gig bringing it up to two point five or three but unfortunately they left it at 2 and even if you purchase the more expensive 64 gigabyte model you're only going to get 2 gigs of ram and for anybody interested yes they do come in different color variants