Amazon Fire HD 6 review

If you've ever used a tablet from Amazon before, you'll feel right at home on the Fire HD 6, basically because everything is pretty much the same as it has always been.

Fire OS 4 now runs atop Android 4.4 but looks completely unrecognisable from Google's baby. Instead of a typical homescreen, you're presented with a carousel of content that incorporates all your apps, movies, books and music. When you open a new app it takes its place at the front of the carousel, though you can pin content you use most frequently so they stay at the front.

Swipe up from the carousel and a more traditional app grid appears, while dragging an app on top of another creates a folder.

Above the carousel is a menu chock full of links to everything Amazon offers, from games to audiobooks, and if you keep scrolling you'll find Amazon's impressive photo storing solution, Cloud Drive.

Swipe down from the top and there's the typical notification shade, with a row of non-customisable quick settings that let you easily alter the brightness, toggle Wi-Fi and jump into the full settings app.

Customisation on the whole is completely non-existent in Fire OS and it's something I really dislike. That means no widgets, no custom icons and you can't even alter the background colour to anything other than black. It's as it comes for the entire time you have the tablet.

Many instantly disregard Amazon's UI and for smartphones, like the Amazon Fire Phone, I agree that is doesn't work. But, for a tablet solely about pushing and consuming content, I think it works perfectly. Everything is within easy reach and it's quick to jump from a book you're reading to the film you were watching last.

It's a purely visual interface, with big icons, film artwork and album covers everywhere, so finding what you want is easy. That is unless you want to get to your email or documents, which both get pushed away every time you open something new.

But, then again this isn't a tablet you'll be wanting to type out a long email on. I tried the email and calendar apps out for a few days as both work with all the usual accounts, such as Google, Yahoo and so on, but was frustrated by the lack of features and functionality. I quickly signed out and never touched them again.

Just like stripping out an Android staple like customisation, Amazon also cuts off access to the Google Play Store, instead restricting you to the brand's own app store.

While the Amazon app store has access to over 24,000 apps, including headline acts like Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, BBC iPlayer and Monument Valley, it lacks some very important apps. Notably, every single Google app. That includes Gmail, Google Maps, Play Music, Chrome - I could go on and on. It seriously hampers the usefulness of any of Amazon's tablets.

As Chrome is a no-go, Amazon's Silk browser takes care of all your web based need. It's a fairly simple tabbed browser that loads pages fast and renders everything as it expected.

As with any browser worth its salt, it lets you save bookmarks and rounds up all most visited pages into a visual page that lets you easily jump back to one.

A 'trending now' section gathers some top stories from around the web and you can easily share to Twitter and other social networks.

If Chrome was available I would install it straight away and Silk would become just another icon I never tapped, but it's not, as annoying as that might be. The truth is that the Silk browser is good enough, but it lacks a few features.

While Amazon decided not to include a few of the software features it added to the Fire Phone, like Mayday customer service or Firefly, Amazon Freetime has made the jump. Freetime is basically a profile switcher designed for kids, a very good one at that.

I mentioned earlier that due to the chunky, durable build, this tablet is perfect for kids and the addition of Amazon Freetime makes this even more so. Set-up is simple; you just tap in a PIN, set-up a profile for your child (or children) and then add in content you've purchased that you're happy for them to use.

There's one thing I haven't really touched upon yet, as I wanted to finish this section with what I feel is most key of all the features, and that's the tablet's integration with Amazon's Prime service.

If you haven't used Prime before, you'll bag a 30-day free trial when you first log-in, but if you have you'll already know the variety of features it brings. I'd recommend anyone picking up this tablet to also grab a Prime membership, the two work hand in hand.

Prime's key selling point on the Fire HD 6 is video, letting you stream Prime movies and TV shows in HD and giving you the option to cache them on the device for offline viewing.

As my review unit only came with 8GB of storage, I was limited in what I could download, but it's still great to be able to carry on watching the latest episode of Mad Men when you're without connection on the tube.

If something you're after isn't on Prime, there's a good chance you'll be able to buy it and download it.

The essentials

My review unit came with just 8GB of internal storage, but out of that I could only use about 4.5GB. Once I'd installed Football Manager Handheld 2015, Monument Valley and Ridiculous Fishing I had used up nearly 2GB.

Add in two HD episodes of Black Sails and I was down to just 700MB free. I'd recommend paying that extra £20, $20 and upping it to 16GB, but even with that you'll be quite restricted.

I also got a case to try out, one of Amazon's leather covers that protects both the rear and the front of the device. It feels good in the hand and slips on with a satisfying click; this case isn't going to fall off without you pulling at it.

Unlike a lot of Amazon's cases it's not an origami style, but part of the back does fold so you can prop it up on a desk. It doesn't feel very secure when it's in this propped up state, but it manages to just about stay up, as long as you don't touch it.