Screen and speakers
With the tablets like the 2,048x1,536
fourth-generation iPad and 2,560x1,600 Nexus 10 on the market, there is no
fascination looking at the 8.9 inch 1,920x1,200 IPS LCD of Kindle Fire HD 8.9.
However, while it will not achieve any title for the pixel density, it is still
great and absolutely suitable for the style of content consumption designed for
this tablet.
Brightness and contrast are as good as what
you can expect from an IPS LCD screen, and the view angle is also subtle. We
cannot experience the feeling of “Gosh I can’t see the pixels” like that in the
Nexus 10, but the text is presented clearly and of course 1080p video looks
fabulous although the micro-HDMI output can make them look even better on a
large-size HDTV.
Amazon
Kindle Fire HD 8.9 screen
However, it is not everything that looks
great. The patented carousel of the content which presented based on icons is
now forced to be zoomed in, and at a higher resolution than expected. Book
covers and film poster look more beautiful and lively in carousel, as well as
optimized applications for Kindle, but many third-party Android icons have
extremely ugly looks. It is to remind you that you cannot strictly criticize a
tablet for the blur icons, but this is the main device that used for
interaction between you and the thing, which unfortunately usually too ugly.
While the screen is an absolute improvement
compared to Kindle 7inch Fire HD, the speakers are a half-step back. They are not
a dual-driver design of the smaller tablet and lack of the power that little
brother owns. The maximum volume is a little lower and fullness of sound
reproduction is a bit weaker, but the sound performance generally is similar. That
is to say, smaller but acceptable and it creates a fabulous musical atmosphere
like in a decent hotel.
Performance and battery life
Kindle Fire HD 8.9 owns a dual-core TI
OMAP4470 operating at 1.5GHz, an enhancement compared to its predecessor. It
helps enhancing the responsiveness of the heavy-handed Fire OS which is sitting
on top of Android, but everything can be slower from time to time. The websites
show themselves quite fast and pinch-zooming is quite quickly responsive, but
scrolling through them is often a very stuttery affair.
Kindle
Fire HD 8.9 owns a dual-core TI OMAP4470 operating at 1.5GHz, an enhancement
compared to its predecessor.
The tablet reaches an average SunSpider
benchmarking score of 1412ms, a huge improvement compared to the 1767ms that
Kindle Fire HD delivers, and follow closely the 1371ms of Nexus 10. For the
comparison, our highest benchmarking score tablet – the fourth generation iPad,
overcame the tests with 865ms.
As a part of the test, we also downloaded
and installed many games, because we thought it would be the popular activities
here. Of course the simple 2D games (Like Angry birds or Star War) easily ran, but
other 3D games also performed perfectly. Unfortunately, because of the more
limited nature of Amazon Appstore, we could not carry out all the tests that we
wanted, but we also did not think that normal gamers would be disappointed.
10
hour battery life is what Amazon advertised for their 8.9inch Kindle Fire HD.
10 hour battery life is what Amazon
advertised for their 8.9inch Kindle Fire HD. It is 1 hour less than the 7inch
version. Based on the fact that the smaller tablet survived 9 hours and 57
minutes in the test, we expected around 9 hours for the 8.9inch version. It
actually did better than that with 1 minute more – 9 hours and 1 minute. (We
tested with the deactivated LTE in order to have a better comparison with the 7inch
model). It lasted 90 minutes more compared to Nexus 10 in the same test of
battery life (in which we played a game repeatedly and set the screen
brightness at default mode) and 25 minutes less than our most favorite 10inch
Android tablet at the moment, Asus Transformer Prime Infinity TF700.
