As well as now charging more quickly it also lasts longer: 12 hours, according to Amazon, versus 10 hours on the previous version. The other main hardware upgrade is to the battery. That said, I did still experience the odd crash, so it’s not yet perfect. By way of comparison, that’s exactly the same amount of time it took on my phone, a OnePlus 7 Pro. On the last-gen device it took 37 seconds to load, but on the new one it got there in just 12 seconds. Take Minecraft – by far the most-played game on my daughters’ tablets. Unsurprisingly, the new one was first every single time – but it surprised me quite how much faster it was. To see what difference it made in practice, I simultaneously loaded apps and videos on both the new tablet and a previous-generation one. The new Fire HD 10 appears to have fixed that problem, with a speedy(ish) octa-core processor now running the show and proving much, much more reliable. Apps would crash from time to time, or take ages to load – particularly if they were fully fledged Android games from the main Amazon Appstore. If we had one criticism of past Fire HD tablets it’s that they never seemed entirely stable. This is very much appreciated, even if my kids would have preferred “red” and “blue”. Lastly, there’s finally a third colour option to avoid the dreaded pink/blue dichotomy, with the addition of a nice purple version. If you remove the tablet from the case, which is much easier than putting the damn thing back in, you’ll also find a microSD card slot, which you can use to expand the built-in 32GB of storage. There are volume and power buttons on the top, plus a mic and headphone port – all accessible via deep holes in the case and therefore a little fiddly to reach – plus (terrible) 2MP front and rear cameras. Otherwise, the Fire HD 10 is almost unchanged in design terms. USB-C is also easier to plug in and many phones and laptops now use it too.Īgainst that, bear in mind that if your kids are anything like mine they will now spend approximately 30% of every day shouting that they can’t plug in their tablets because they’ve picked up the wrong cable, and failing to appreciate lectures about the overall benefits of moving to a new USB standard. Amazon reckons it’ll now juice up from flat in 4hrs, which is at least an hour quicker than the previous version, and in my testing that proved accurate. This is mostly a very good thing, offering faster charging so long as you’re careful to also use the included 9W charger. The other big physical change is that there’s now a USB-C port on the top for charging the Fire HD 10, rather than microUSB. This was obviously an essential change for it to be used standing up to watch videos, but as a nice bonus it now sounds much better when being held, too. The stand itself is pretty well implemented: it rotates through 270 degrees, so you can prop up the tablet to watch videos with the screen leaning either slightly forwards or slightly backwards, and it’s big enough to provide plenty of stability in this mode.Īmazon’s had to make the case bigger in order to fit the stand on, but that really doesn’t matter, because the Fire HD 10 Kids Edition is already far too large to be used one-handed – particularly if those hands are little chocolate-covered ones.īut one extra benefit from the size increase is that there’s now space for the speaker cutouts to be positioned on the front of the case, facing towards you, rather than on the bottom where they were before. The case has had a couple of changes for 2019, with the main one being the addition of the kick-stand. It works brilliantly, though, cushioning the tablet from even a hefty fall onto a hard kitchen floor. With its protective case surrounding it, there’s no mistaking who the Fire HD 10 Kids Edition is aimed at: it’s a big, bold and rubbery affair that looks faintly ridiculous in the hands of anyone over the age of about 12.
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