AMAZON KINDLE FIRE HDX

Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 8.9"

     

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.