Amazon Announces New Fire HD 10 Tablet

[booklover6]

The resolution of the 7" is extremely awful for reading. The resolution of the 8" isn't great for reading, when compared side by side with screens that have better resolution. That's why I ordered the new 10". The resolution is much better.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by stumped

or if you wait, there will probably be another round of reductions after Xmas

If they go on sale after Christmas, the prices will be higher than they are now. If you want low pricing, then you need to get one between now and Cyber Monday.

[stumped]

Originally Posted by booklover6

The resolution of the 7" is extremely awful for reading. The resolution of the 8" isn't great for reading, when compared side by side with screens that have better resolution. That's why I ordered the new 10". The resolution is much better.

for many people the 6 inch kindle is a better device for reading ( 300+ ppi) but at three times the price of the 7 inch tablet, which can do so much more than be a reading device.

what's better for an individual depends on planned usage.
kindle e ink readers are optimized for a great reading experience, fire tablets are general purpose, designed to do many things at an OK level [ and to sell you more amazon digital content, of course ]

[booklover6]

No argument there!!! I was simply comparing reading on Fire tablets. I greatly prefer my kindle or kobo ereader! OTOH I don't want to turn my kindle wifi on to get Kindle Unlimited books, so I am going to use the Fire 10 for that.

(Yes I can side load the KU title to my Kindles but I've never gotten an answer as to whether the author gets page-read credits for loading books that way. I want them to get paid!)

Originally Posted by stumped

for many people the 6 inch kindle is a better device for reading ( 300+ ppi) but at three times the price of the 7 inch tablet, which can do so much more than be a reading device.

what's better for an individual depends on planned usage.
kindle e ink readers are optimized for a great reading experience, fire tablets are general purpose, designed to do many things at an OK level [ and to sell you more amazon digital content, of course ]

[Ricky D'Angelo]

The clear advantage my cheap kindle fire 7 has over the kindle e-ink devices is the immersion reading in addition for the option of text to speech and/or audio books. I believe some paperwhites allow the ability to listen to audiobooks but don't have immersion reading so advantage fire tablet. Another plus for fire tablets is the ability to expand memory which kindle e-ink devices lack.

[Paperbackstash]

Thank you for the advice, all. I decided to go with the 8", that should serve my purposes well.

[haertig]

Can you still install Google Play Store on these new Fire 10" tablets running FireOS 7?

How much faster does the new 10" Fire feel compared to a two year old Fire HD8 (2017 - gen 7 model)?

[booklover6]

Originally Posted by haertig

Can you still install Google Play Store on these new Fire 10" tablets running FireOS 7?

Yes if you look in the Amazon Fire forum here on mobile read, someone just posted that they were able to install the Play Store.

Mine hasn't shipped yet, but I will be installing it immediately once it arrives.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by leebase

It's hard to pay "iPad money" for reading. If I didn't use my tablet for so many other things...I'd not buy an iPad.

Lol, I paid "iPad-money" for a 64GB iPad 2 solely for comic reading. At the time of release, it worked much better and was cheaper than the Windows/Atom-based UMPC alternatives. Mind, iPad-money is a pretty big range nowadays ($250-1700).

Surprised to see Amazon charging more for storage upgrades compared to Apple (Amazon $1.25-$1.88 per GB; Apple $0.59-1.04 per GB). Definitely better to just use a microSD card if one needs more storage on the Fire.

It's a shame that Amazon never increased resolution on their normal tablet lineup choosing instead to double down on ultra low pricing. Iirc, the discontinued Fire HDX 7" was 1920*1200, 300g and Fire HDX 8.9" was 2560*1600, 375g. Would've liked an 8" version of the Fire HD 10 even at the same $150 price point.

I'll probably grab one. At $100 for Fire HD 10 + $65 for a 512GB microSD, it makes for a pretty nice media player. Anyone know if this natively supports 4K H.265/HEVC MKV and what player to use? Converting to 1080p H.264/AVC is pretty time consuming.

[haertig]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

Anyone know if this natively supports 4K H.265/HEVC MKV and what player to use? Converting to 1080p H.264/AVC is pretty time consuming.

Obviously, a Fire tablet will not display 4k. It doesn't have the sceen resolution to do that. However, I would expect that it would down convert it to something it could play. But does the CPU have enough horsepower to do the down convert in real time? Again, I expect that it would, because it only has to down convert fast enough to support normal speed viewing. But I guess that's a question for Amazon. Also, if you're slinging 4k videos at the Fire tablet, that's going to consume a lot of network bandwidth and local storage for video information that you will just be throwing away. Still, that might be better than spending years and years converting all your 4k videos manually on your computer and cooking its CPU. If you're interested in streaming rather than playing local content, look into the Plex media server, as it will down convert on the fly as it streams. This does not take anywhere near the horsepower that manual down converting "all at once" does.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by haertig

Obviously, a Fire tablet will not display 4k. It doesn't have the sceen resolution to do that. However, I would expect that it would down convert it to something it could play. But does the CPU have enough horsepower to do the down convert in real time? Again, I expect that it would, because it only has to down convert fast enough to support normal speed viewing. But I guess that's a question for Amazon. Also, if you're slinging 4k videos at the Fire tablet, that's going to consume a lot of network bandwidth and local storage for video information that you will just be throwing away. Still, that might be better than spending years and years converting all your 4k videos manually on your computer and cooking its CPU. If you're interested in streaming rather than playing local content, look into the Plex media server, as it will down convert on the fly as it streams. This does not take anywhere near the horsepower that manual down converting "all at once" does.

I already have Plex. Alas, I don't have a fast enough CPU to reliably *decode* 4K H.265/HEVC in real-time much less transcode it. The PC can do 4K H.264/AVC decode/transcode but H.265/HEVC is a different beast altogether. CPU's 7 years old and at that time, Intel has barely even added full support for H.264 to their integrated graphics. Plus, PC's somewhat prone to overheating now. Hasn't been much of a concern since its primary use is Calibre and I don't do any complicated conversions.

The question here is if the chipset in the Fire HD supports hardware decode acceleration. Doing brute-force decode with CPU would kill the battery quite quickly.

I guess network bandwidth is another issue. I can stream UHD66 and UHD100 rips to the iPad on 802.11ac. Fire HD 10 appears to have 802.11ac MIMO so that seems promising. Storage should be fine. 512GB can hold ~8 full UHD rips and I have a 4TB portable HDD for swapping content to the microSD card.