Physical Design and Networking
The tablet comes in 16, 32, and 64 GB models, with or without ads on the home screen, and with or without AT&T or Verizon 4G LTE connectivity. The base price is $379 and can reach up to $594. Each step up in memory costs $50, ditching the ads (Special Offers) costs $15 on top of that, and adding an AT&T or Verizon Wireless LTE modem is another $100. We tested the base 16GB, Wi-Fi-only model with Special Offers.
Extremely slim and light, the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 measures 9.1 by 6.2 by .31 inches (HWD) and weighs in at 13.2 ounces. It's lighter than the iPad Air, which admittedly, has a larger 9.7-inch screen. The tablet is well-built, mostly of soft-touch black plastic with some modernist-looking angles on the back. The 2,560-by-1,600, 339 pixel-per-inch 8.9-inch display shows rich colors but not reflections. It's denser than the iPad Air's, at about the same brightness. The result is that Web site text appears slightly smaller than on the Air, but it isn't blurry at all. The front and rear cameras are on the top center of the tablet, when held in landscape mode.
The tablet has dual-band Wi-Fi with a MIMO antenna, and results were decent on the Ookla Speedtest.net app, but we got much better performance on the iPad Air both in strong and weak signal conditions. For instance, at about 30 feet from a router with a 100-megabit connection, through a steel door, the HDX got 7.66Mbps down while the iPad showed 18.1Mbps.
Battery life is very good here: We got 7 hours, 44 minutes in our tests where we loop a video with the screen set to maximum brightness. That's 90 minutes more than the iPad Air; it's also 13 minutes longer than the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. With brightness notched down to half, the Kindle HDX 8.9" will surely hit Amazon's 12-hour estimated battery life.
Fire OS, Performance, and Apps
The HDX runs Amazon's Fire OS "Mojito" 3.0 on a 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor. The Fire OS is based on Android and runs third-party Android apps, but it has veered far from the Google path; there are no Google apps here, and no Google Play store access. Instead, you get a simplified interface that's focused on surfing the Web, games, books, music, and video from the Amazon store.
Benchmarks are excellent, as this is a top-of-the-line processor: The Browsermark benchmark hit 3,155, the best we've seen on any similar device other than the iPad Air. Cloud-based acceleration makes some popular Web pages, such as the New York Times, appear even more quickly than this result would imply, often within a second or two.
The GFXBench graphics benchmark showed 39 frames per second, also good for this very high screen resolution. More importantly, the HDX blazed through various apps, including processor-intensive games like Asphalt 8 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted.
We go into a lot more detail on Fire OS 3.0 in our 7-inch Kindle Fire HDX review, so check that out for more details. A bunch of additional features are coming later this month, so I didn't have a chance to test them, including many enterprise security features, and the ability to wirelessly "fling" video to a TV using a Miracast adapter like a Netgear Push2TV box.
With the tablet, you get $5 in Amazon Appstore credit, and you're likely to find most of the Android apps you want in the store. (Yes, there's Candy Crush Saga!) I noticed that titles in Amazon's store are sometimes behind, or are older versions than you'd find in the Google Play store, though. For instance, Amazon offers a version behind both of our Geekbench and Antutu benchmarks, and the store lacks some of the more recent Kemco RPGs. As for Amazon competitors, Netflix and Hulu are present; Nook and YouTube are not (although you can access YouTube through the HDX's very speedy Web browser). If you're sufficiently techy, you can sideload any Android app by using a USB cable.
Source : PCMag
Image : PCMag
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