Amazon Kindle Fire-HDX 7 Review

Amazon Kindle Fire-HDX 7 Review

You could call Amazon’s Kindle Fire the anti-Nexus. While the new Kindle Fire HDX may be based on Android, it’s resolutely designed to cater for avid customers of Amazon’s store, tailoring just about every part of the experience to streamline your shopping (whether digital or physical). Amazon may be selling the Kindle Fire HDX 7″ practically at cost, but that doesn’t mean the specifications underwhelm: one of the fastest processors paired with an incredible 7-inch 323 ppi display make for a pocketable powerhouse
. Thrown in Mayday, Amazon’s new rescue service for confused novices, and you’ve a tablet that wants to be a jack of all trades. Does it succeed? Read on for the full review.

Hardware and Design

Smaller than the last 7-inch Kindle Fire in all dimensions, not to mention lighter in weight, the new Fire HDX 7 may look like its predecessor at first glance but it’s a far more successful design in the hands. Amazon has stuck with the sober blacks of previous models, here covered for the most part in a soft-touch rubberized plastic that makes the bulk of the rear grippy. A glossy strip of black plastic running across the upper edge gives a little visual interest – it’s also where the stereo speakers are, and where your fingerprints are regularly collected on the shiny material.

Bevelled edges lead to the equally unassuming bezel, with edge-to-edge glass covering the 7-inch display and front-facing camera. Although the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HDX will have a rear camera, this smaller model makes do without; Amazon tells us that’s because it envisages most users switching to their smartphone for any photography done in earnest.

Physical controls have been spread across the back of the tablet, split with the power/standby button on one side and the volume rocker on the other. They’re pleasingly tactile and clicky to press, falling underneath the fingers easily.

While it may look much the same as before, Amazon has actually changed its production processes and construction of the Kindle Fire HDX quite considerably, much to the tablet’s benefit. Rather than wrapping a plastic casing around an inner chassis, the Kindle Fire HDX makes its new magnesium alloy body both the frame and the casing. That’s what allows for a 7.3 x 5.0 x 0.35 inch, 10.7 ounce design.

Specifications

Into that soft-touch shell, Amazon injects Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 800 chipset running at a hefty 2.2GHz, and paired with Adreno 330 graphics along with 2GB of memory. There’s a choice of 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of internal storage (of which 10.9GB, 25.5GB, or 54.3GB is user-available) though still no memory card slot; Amazon would rather you store things in the cloud and either retrieve or stream as needed.

Connectivity includes WiFi a/b/g/n (dual band) along with Bluetooth as standard. There’s also a 3.5mm headphone socket and a microUSB port for charging and synchronizing. Amazon offers LTE versions of the Kindle Fire HDX 7 for either AT&T or Verizon’s 4G networks; those versions also include assisted-GPS.

The Kindle Fire HDX 7′s crowning glory is undoubtedly its display, though. The 7-inch panel runs at a hefty 1920 x 1200 resolution – that’s higher than Full HD – for 323 ppi pixel density. If you couldn’t guess, that means incredibly smooth graphics, jag-free text, and the sort of crisp realism at the cutting edge of mobile gaming.

Detail isn’t this display’s only advantage, however. It’s also the first Kindle Fire screen to support 100-percent sRGB color accuracy, and Amazon has cooked up a new Dynamic Image Contrast system to better handle indoor/outdoor use. Rather than simply notching up the backlight to maximum whenever you step into direct sunlight, the Fire HDX’s ambient light sensor can actually control the on-screen contrast. So, in bright conditions the contrast of the panel can be increased to make it easier to see differences in graphics and text; it also helps reduce battery consumption from actively backlighting the screen.

We were skeptical, but it works surprisingly well. Set aside any expectations that the Kindle can deliver the sort of direct sunlight visibility of, say, e-paper on a traditional ereader, but there’s still enough detail there to comfortably use the Kindle Fire HDX in bright conditions.

he Kindle Fire HDX 7′s crowning glory is undoubtedly its display, though. The 7-inch panel runs at a hefty 1920 x 1200 resolution – that’s higher than Full HD – for 323 ppi pixel density. If you couldn’t guess, that means incredibly smooth graphics, jag-free text, and the sort of crisp realism at the cutting edge of mobile gaming.

Fire OS

The Kindle Fire software now has a name, or at least a public one. In actual fact, Amazon has been referring to the modified Android platform as Fire OS since the start, but it’s only with the Fire HDX range that the name has graduated to public use. Amazon is now on version 3.0 – codenamed “Mojito” – with 3.1 waiting in the wings for an imminent release.

Although at first glance it looks much like the second-gen Kindle Fire, there are tweaks and changes throughout the interface. The side-scrolling carousel of apps and content remains, but now you can swipe up and see a more traditional grid layout. Icons can be rearranged, though not dragged on top of each other to create folders; the icon underneath just squeaks out of the way.

Running across the top edge there’s a shortcut bar to all of the key content you’ll have on your Kindle Fire HDX, from the shop, through games and apps, ebooks, music and videos, the web, photos, and more. Rather than treat each app type – e.g. ereader app, or music app, or video app – as the most granular level, Fire OS goes one step deeper to the content itself. It’s a small change over regular Android, but it makes a big difference when jumping between items, particularly when using the new pull-out app switcher.

Sliding out on the right, from the Home/Back bar, this has icons for all your recent apps and content, making it easy to jump between them. There’s no split-screen functionality to have two titles showing simultaneously, mind, nor thumbnail previews of what the app is currently showing; ebooks do get a percentage to show how far through them you are.

Later this year, Amazon will add Cloud Collections, as it launched on the iOS Kindle app. That will allow for groups of documents, apps, and periodicals to be gathered up as Collections and automatically synchronized: so, rather than having to download each of the Harry Potter books individually, you’ll be able to pull them all down from Amazon’s servers with one tap.

Amazon is pretty keen to stress that this isn’t a reskin to Android but a partial rewrite. Gone is the standard Android graphics pipeline, replaced with Amazon’s own Graphics Direct Texture to keep things like the content carousel moving smoothly despite the high screen resolution, and there’s a new download manager which can not only download multiple things simultaneously, but open videos, magazines, and audiobooks while they’re still in progress.

On top of that there’s new enterprise support. The email client has been refined, adding preset configurations for the common account types to streamline setup, and adding threaded messaging and synchronization. The Fire HDX offers hardware encryption for those IT departments wanting to make sure user data is locked up tight, and there’ll be wireless printing support – if you have a compatible printer – later in the year.

Probably of more use to most consumers will be the new comparison shopping system in the Amazon store. Now, by tapping and holding a preview image and flicking it down to the bottom of the screen, you can build up an impromptu portfolio of items to compare: tapping the thumbnails switches between each product page. It’s certainly quicker than jumping between the overall product list and each different page, though it’s not quite a side-by-side comparison.

Camera

The Kindle Fire HDX 7 might not have the 8-megapixel rear camera of its 8.9-inch sibling, but it does get Amazon’s new camera app. That supports still or video photography – including the ability to snap a still while you’re recording footage – and has a new editor suite for tweaking and post-processing.

It’s surprisingly full-featured, too, ranging from more mainstream tools like crop, redeye-reduction, rotate, auto-enhance, and brightness/contrast/saturation, through to clipart, meme-text, and sketching tools.

The gallery collects not only the local photos on the Kindle Fire HDX itself, but optionally shots from your Facebook profile and synchronized over from your phone. Considering Fire OS’ editing suite bests what Facebook and most smartphone apps we’ve seen do, out of the box at least, we could see many people using the Kindle as a hub for processing images.

Battery

Amazon says you’ll get up to eleven hours of mixed use from a full charge of the Kindle Fire HDX, or alternatively up to seventeen hours in Reading Mode, when the processor, memory, and other components can be set into low-power mode.

“Mixed use” on a tablet is a particularly arbitrary thing. When we spent most of our time reading Kindle ebooks and browsing, we found the Fire HDX lasted several days before requiring a recharge. Conversely, video streaming, gaming, and using the speakers saw that fall quite steeply, though still to levels where we could be away from the mains for more than a day.

Amazon’s estimates look broadly right, then, though you should expect less runtime if you’re an avid gamer stressing that potent Snapdragon 800; expect the gage to drop a little faster if you have the LTE model and make frequent use of cellular data. The surprise to us was how long the Kindle Fire HDX could run in Reading Mode; we’ll update with more battery statistics when we’ve had more time to live with the tablet.

Any quires comment below.