Amazon Fire HD 10 (2023) review: Cheap and mostly cheerful

‘iPad’ might be the catch-all term for ‘tablet’ these days but even the cheapest iPad Apple sells is expensive at £369 – and it came out way back in 2021. So which brand do you turn to if you want a genuinely cheap tablet in 2024?

It could be Amazon. We’ve been using the latest version of the Amazon Fire HD 10 to see if this £150 slate is up to the task. It keeps the price down by being made with plastic, being relatively low-powered, and peppering you with ads.

The Fire HD 10 also doesn’t run full Android like other tablets can because it doesn’t have the Google Play Store, so you can’t use Google apps plus a few others that are missing. In many ways the Fire HD 10 exists to ensure you keep watching videos, reading books, and buying stuff from Amazon.

But all in all if you want an affordable tablet for yourself or your kids to use to mainly watch TV shows and films on various streaming services, read ebooks, or play games, this is a great option.

• Rounded plastic back
• Volume and power buttons
• Front and rear cameras

The Fire HD 10 has an incredibly plain and simple plastic design. In the black version we reviewed it really has no eye catching looks – there is a purple or blue option if you prefer. The black version picks up fingerprint smears quite quickly, but they wipe away easily enough.

There’s an embossed Amazon smile logo on the back and a small camera up in one corner, and that’s it besides a volume rocker and power button, USB-C port, and headphone jack, the latter of which is a godsend if you want to give this to a child – simply plug in the headphones, no need for Bluetooth.

On the top as you hold the tablet in landscape are the two speakers, with a central selfie camera for video calls. You also get a microSD card slot on the bottom edge if you want to boost your storage.

You shouldn’t notice the 433.6g weight too much in a bag.

As the name Fire HD 10 suggests, the tablet has a high-definition (HD) 10.1-inch LCD screen. Though many modern phones use brighter, often sharper OLED screens, most tablets still use LCD – and the one here is surprisingly great considering the price.

Netflix shows look great, and comparable to the £369 10.2-inch iPad in terms of brightness and overall quality. It only occasionally looks At this size, the 1920 x 1200 more than enough, though it is less than the iPad’s 2160 x 1620. The screen does not have a high refresh rate, but most tablets don’t.

Though the thick black bezels around the edge of the screen make the device look less cutting-edge than some other tablets, it’s actually quite handy to have this space to hold onto. A thumb or two gripping the edge won’t cover any of the display, and we sat for several hours while testing the HD 10 with little hand fatigue as it’s relatively lightweight.

The dual stereo speakers get plenty loud without distorting and do a nice job for TV and movies if you don’t want to plug headphones in. Radio or podcast playback also sounds good, but you’ll want to grab those earbuds if you want to listen to music as this is where there’s a lack of quality.

• Good enough performance
• 32GB or 64GB storage
• Multi-day battery life

As mentioned, Amazon sells a keyboard case and stylus pen separately that work with the Fire HD 10. We weren’t able to test them, but their existence means Amazon says the tablet can be used for work and productivity. Without them, this is practically impossible – typing on the on-screen keyboard is no way to get work done.

But most people shouldn’t buy this tablet to work with. It’s for casually watching videos, mainly, and it excels at that. The limited power of the processor under the hood isn’t obvious when all you need to do is stream Netflix over Wi-Fi or browse the web, but when we had a few apps open it would sometimes grind to a halt and freeze. We had to close all apps to get it to behave again.

You can buy the Fire HD 10 with either 32GB or 64GB internal storage, but the microSD card lets you add a card up to 1TB if you want to download and keep tons of music or videos.

Battery life is also great, particularly on standby. Many times we’ve picked up an iPad after not using it for three or so days to find it dead. Not so with the Fire HD 10, which clings onto power admirably when the screen is locked. Using it naturally sees the battery drop, but we used it to watch videos casually on most evenings and found we only had to charge it every three or four days.

• Alexa well integrated
• No Google apps
• Amazon ads are annoying

The Fire HD 10, like all Amazon tablets, runs Fire OS – basically Android without Google apps or services. If you want to use Gmail, Google Maps, Google Chrome, and Google Docs, this is not the tablet to buy.

The Amazon Appstore has Microsoft apps such as Microsoft 365 and Outlook, but not Word or Excel, though firm favourites Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, X, and Zoom are present and correct. In terms of popular streaming apps you can get Prime Video, Netflix, Disney+, Now TV, Freevee, BBC iPlayer, ITV X, and Channel 4. There’s no Apple TV+ or Paramount+ or YouTube – the latter a big miss.

The Appstore isn’t great at showing you mainstream apps you might want to download, preferring to push colourful games no one has heard of in your face. Popular titles such as PUBG Mobile, Minecraft and Roblox are all here to keep the kids entertained, though.

Speaking of, you can also create a child’s profile to control the settings and limit what your child can do on the tablet. You can even add up to four of these profiles so your young ones can share the device when needed.

Amazon apps and services are all over the Fire HD 10 to an annoying degree. If you only subscribe to Amazon Prime Video and read Kindle books then you might not mind, but we found it irritating to have a bar of suggested content on the homescreen at all times, trying to get us to watch something new or buy something we had previously viewed on the Amazon Shopping app.

There are even ads on the lockscreen, like the below one for a car. If you don’t want these ads, you have to buy a version of the tablet that costs £10 more. Amazon’s insistence on either showing you ads or having you pay more not to see them is insulting when you’ve bought the device. We advise paying more to not have ads, but you shouldn’t have to.

What makes up for this is being able to use Show Mode that turns the Fire HD 10 into a smart screen device similar to an Amazon Echo Show. This means it can sit propped up and you can ask the Alexa voice assistant to search, play music or radio, or anything else you’d expect of such a device. Getting two different tablet modes for the price of one is a bit of a steal, and it works really well.

There is a decent enough 5MP camera on the front (same as the back) for you to make video calls on your app of choice too, including using Show Mode to Alexa call other Echo devices.

The Amazon Fire HD 10 costs from £149.99 for the 32GB storage version with ads. We recommend spending £159.99 for the same model without ads.

Amazon also regularly has the tablet on offer and can sometimes be found for as low as £109.99.

View the Amazon Fire HD 10 on Amazon here

Because this is a tablet mainly for streaming video and playing games, we got by with just 32GB on our review model. But if you want to download a lot of content you could get the 64GB version with no ads for £189.99 – or buy a microSD card.

The Amazon Fire HD 10 has a few good features but at its core it’s a video streaming tablet – and it does this very well. Download all your favourite streaming services and log in once and this device will suit you down to the ground. With good battery life it’s the perfect affordable screen to buy for the commute or plane journeys.

But if you want to do anything more than that, the Fire HD 10 is not for you. Amazon says it’s for work if you want to, but without Google apps this won’t work for many people, plus the tablet often grinds to a halt when you try to do more than one thing on it as it’s quite underpowered.

You get what you pay for at this price point but that’s no bad thing if all you need is a tablet for videos and games, plus you get the useful Show Mode and it can make video calls. If you find the iPad line up confusing and overpriced, the Fire HD 10 is a solid alternative. Just don’t expect the world of it.