AmazonFire HD 8 Plus tablet, 8” HD Display, 32 GB, 30% faster processor, 3GB RAM, wireless charging, (2022 release), Gray

Great except I forget Black Friday was a thing a bought it a week before it went on sale. I’ve always loved kindles and was excited to get a new one since the one I had was almost 10 years old. I swear these things are invincible. I don’t use cases because I don’t want it too bulky and have never so much as scratched the screen. Great quality. I love that it can be kid friendly as well as the games that are available for download. This would be a great gift for a loved one or yourself.Great for travel. Used for reading, games, YouTube, photos, or any streaming services

**UPDATE**I changed my review from a 1 star to a 5 star review. After posting the 1 star review Amazon almost immediately called me. El was amazingly helpful to rectify the issue. She is very knowledgeable and patient. SHE deserves 5 stars!! 🌟 With her help I was able to do some modifications to the tablet. Ultimately I needed to factory reset the tablet, update ALL of the tablet updates (10 total....I think) We tested it out while she was on the phone and books now download the way they should when I send them to the Fire. No more exclamation (!) points!! I am now a happy Fire tablet owner!! Thanks El!!!!I will NEVER buy a Fire tablet again. The whole point to purchasing this tablet was to load Kindle books. Without fail, I go into the Kindle app and every book I send to this tablet has an exclamation (!) point and you either get "Cancel"/"Retry" or "Dismiss"/"Settings".... Not a single book downloads the way it should on this tablet. I'm talking hundreds of books here. Not just every once in awhile...I have NO problems with any of my Android devices downloading books using the Kindle app so, it isn't an app issue...

If you need a tablet for professional use or heavy gaming, you're probably better off with an iPad or a less budget-friendly Android tablet. But if you're looking for something to serve as an entertainment device to watch videos, scroll through social media or news apps, and play the occasional casual game, then this tablet is close to perfect for the price.I bought mine during the July Prime sales because I wanted something other than my phone for watching videos. I don't mind watching videos on my phone, but I don't want to waste recharging cycles and wear out my phone battery for the sake of indulging in YouTube or binge-watching Only Murders in the Building! I occasionally used my late mother's old Fire from 2018, but I didn't love it; it felt laggy. So I crossed my fingers and bought the HD 8 Plus. I'm very pleased with it. It's much snappier than the old Fire, and I think having the extra RAM really helps. When both the regular and the Plus versions are on sale, the Plus isn't that much more expensive.It's been great for watching videos and doing some other basic internet stuff. I put the play store on just to download a couple of apps that the Amazon app store doesn't have, and that's worked smoothly.As an entertainment device or as a backup to your phone or a more powerful tablet, this is great. You can use most of the basic communication and social media aps and watch videos from all of the major streaming services. It's also not bad for Kindle books, especially ones with illustrations or color photos, though I still prefer my regular Kindle for reading text.The only thing that I really don't like is the feel of the touch screen. It works just fine, but all of my phones and my earlier tablets had gorilla glass, so I guess I'm spoiled by that.In terms of design, I think that the Amazon "skin" over the android os is particularly useful for young kids and for less tech-savvy adults who can take advantage of the straightforward presentation of apps and content, especially if your household uses the Amazon ecosystem for other things, such as Ring doorbells, Alexa, Kindle, Prime, etc. That said, there's quite a bit of content "suggested" to you by Amazon (advertised), and if you're an impulse buyer, that might not be good!I haven't needed to set up parental controls, but they are there, so parents can customize what their kids can do with the tablet, which is a nice feature.Oh, he my mom's old tablet has found a new role as an ersatz Echo, plugged in in our living room with Alexa on show mode. Works great!

This tablet is pretty good for what it is. It works well, the Plus version with 3G Ram and new processor handles multitasking and app switching quite nicely, with no time wasting performance lags.My story is that I bought this to replace a three year old Kindle Fire 7 that was just slow. As Amazon updated the Fire OS over the last three years, this fire 7 just got slower and slower, so I wanted something that could keep up. This little Fire 7 worked perfectly, except that it was bogged down and slow whenever there were stuff updating in the background or if I wanted to briefly switch between apps.The Fire 8 Plus solved my issues with the old Fire 7. No lags, no delays! I'm sure that the 3G of RAM makes a difference here. The included apps on the Fire 8 such as mail, calendar, browser, are functional but limiting. Out of the box, it could install and run Netflix, Prime Video, Kindle reader and has a built in Amazon Shop app, so that's a good start. Alexa is not required, and can be disabled/bypassed, but it cannot be uninstalled. Perfect for me because I don't use Alexa, nor do I want it listening to me. All the other amazon apps I'm not interested in using, and there is also no way to uninstall them... so there's a bunch of junk apps and shortcuts that I will ignore and will just take up space forever and never be used.So, moving on... I was able to install the Google Play store and got it to work. Now this opened up a large multitude of additional apps that can run on this device without any problems. GMail, Chrome, Contacts, Maps, Facebook, YoutubeTV, Youtube, Podcasts, Games, Calculator, Banking Apps, Gboard, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, ToDo, Word, Excel, AdobePdf, Roku, MyRadar, Pandora, Mlb. All working quite nicely, installed from the Play store and the Play store is keeping them updated. NICE! I was able to set Chrome as my default browser, and GBoard as my default keyboard. NICE! Google calendar would install, but I could not get it to work. I can live with that as I use outlook for my calendar. YoutubeTV works well, but I could not get the floating picture to work when switching apps. I'm not a big fan of this feature in YTV, so I can live without that.Now, there are a few apps that the Play store just will not install on this device. But that does not mean that those apps won't work, just that the Play store can't install and update them. So far, the two that I have run into are the Royal Caribbean app and the Giant food stores app. I could download the APKs from apkmirror and they worked perfectly. Good enough for me. I use these apps infrequently, so I created a chrome bookmark to the apkmirror links so that I can manually update them periodically.One downside is the physical size - I'm still getting used to it. I was used to the smaller size of the Fire 7 - it fit well in my hand and was compact enough to carry in a large pocket. Unfortunately, the current F7 does not have as much RAM, which is needed for multitasking and fast app switching. The Fire 8 Plus is about 3/4 inch wider and taller. Thickness is the same. The size is clunky and edges curved and smooth, so when using one-handed and I was afraid I would drop it while I waited for the case that I ordered. Once I got the case... ahhhh... I felt more comfortable holding it, and the size is less of an issue. Although the F8 is too big to fit easilly in a pocket.Another downside is the launcher. It is not possible to change the default app launcher, so you are stuck with the super simple one provided by Amazon. Every installed app appears on the home page, so it can get large and crowded. But it does allow me to arrange my apps in named groups, so it can be organized. It is basic and functional, so it will do.So far - so good. For an inexpensive tablet, the workarounds for the Google apps are good and worth it. Hope it stays this way.