Why Amazon's latest Fire HD models are stuck in a tablet no-man's land
Amazon's newest Fire HD tablets have a problem: It's hard to be in the middle of the road when you're selling gadgets these days.
At $230 and $150, respectively, the Fire HD 10 and Fire HD 8 sit in a funny no man's land. On the one hand, they're too pricey to be cheap - for that, Amazon has a $50 tablet it would like you to look at, which you can opt to buy in a six-pack that still costs less than the cheapest iPad.
At the same time, these Fire HD tablets are not quite good enough to consider as a cheaper option to a high-end tablet - the money you save may not be worth the trade-offs you make.
No one's quite sure how the tablet market - which is really just five years old - is going to play out. But if it's anything like the smartphone market, we can probably expect to see two very clear paths to success: pursuing the high-end or dominating the low-end. Smartphone success seems to come either by being a premium brand - which is hard to establish - or by selling lots of devices that are cheap but pretty good - though that's no cakewalk from a profit standpoint.
In tablets, the high-end has fallen to Apple and Samsung, which are offering cutting-edge tablets that can be marketed as productivity tools, but do not cost less than $300 or $400. At the low end, there are the sub-$100 tablets that are really designed for consumption, meaning that they'll work for watching videos on a plane but you probably don't want to try and do any work on them.
Enter Amazon. Cheap but good may be an area it can own, as the firm has traditionally eschewed profit and used its gadgets as a portal to content. In fact, given that the company's attempts to make high-end devices fizzled - the Fire Phone, for example - cheaper tablets are sort of a return to form.
But with the new Fire HD tablets, the company didn't return far enough. These tablets have the screen sizes of Amazon's pricier HDX line (starting price $430) - which is not getting an update this year. But in terms of quality, the new HD 10 and HD 8 have improved little over last year's mid-tier Fire tablets.
That shows up in a few ways. For example, neither the HD 8 nor the HD 10 have the crisp display of the HDX line, which is particularly important for a consumption device. It's especially noticeable on the 10-inch tablet, which was perfectly fine for watching video but wore on my eyes over time for reading books. The Fire HD 8 was a little better in this respect, but still not nearly as crisp as, say, firing the Kindle app up on a high-end smartphone.
The new tablets' performance was also very middle of the road. Amazon loaned The Post pre-release devices with pre-release software, and it's likely that Amazon will be improving and polishing its software moving forward. But spending several days using the tablets, I often found myself frustrated with what I had to work with. There were noticeable stutters, for example, when I started apps up for the first time and even occasionally when I tried to get back to the homescreen. Video playback was smooth - a crucial box to check for Amazon since its tablets try aggressively to get you to pick up more Amazon content whenever possible. (Amazon's chief executive, Jeffrey Bezos, is the owner of The Washington Post.)
Browsing on the company's Silk browser was also fast. But I often found myself waiting impatiently for content in apps to load. Even in Amazon's own Kindle app, it would sometimes take so long to get to my book that I wondered whether the tablet had frozen.
There were things I liked about the tablets. For example, the sound quality for a tablet at this price point was surprisingly good. I picked up background noises and sound effects in television shows on the Fire HD that I didn't get when watching on other tablets, or even my television. The tablets also have a slightly odd proportion that I actually liked for widescreen viewing. In the case of the smaller tablet the stretched-out shape was also good for getting a lot of text onto a single "page" of an e-book. And the option for expandable memory is welcome - both tablets support up to 128 GB of memory.
Still, given what we've seen from Amazon lately, these tablets feel like leftovers from another strategy, somewhere between the company's former play for the high-end and the renewed push for the low. For some consumers, these may be acceptable trade-offs. But most probably won't be that interested in getting stuck in the middle.