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Battery life and camera

Battery life

Amazon claims 12 hours of 'mixed use' life
It performed well in our tests

As we have seen, it is difficult to really compare smartphones and tablets. They are different devices for different use cases. The Amazon Fire HD 10 (2019), in particular, is meant for the home - you can take it with you on the commute, but it is really there as a miniature TV.

So then, what does this mean for its battery life?

Amazon follows the trends of the likes of Apple, which is to say that we don’t know the exact size of the battery contained within - and that the manufacturer lists the tablet as working across 12 hours of ‘mixed use’.

And we mostly found this to be the case. Charging up on a Monday then watching around an hour or two of video per evening, plus playing some music now and then and reading in bed, we found that after four days it still wasn’t dead and had some juice in the tank. This suggests good standby times, however this is an inevitable by-product of not having a call radio embedded.

Running the TechRadar battery test (a 90-minute video played over Wi-Fi at maximum brightness) we saw the battery drop from 100% to 91%, which is in line with the specs provided by the manufacturer. It will most likely even be enough to see you through a long-distance flight (though perhaps not to Australia).

Camera

2MP cameras on both the front and back
Photographic skills are very poor

In 2019, it is somewhat sad to say that there are still some poor souls in the world for whom a tablet is their sole photographic device of choice. Despite the fact that, statistically, almost every shot they take is terrible, still they persist.

As there is a target audience, how does the snapper on the Amazon Fire HD 10 (2019) measure up?

By every account, poorly. The 2MP snapper on the rear has basic specs and it lives up to them. Each image snapped has poor colors, smudged detail, poor dynamic range and lots of noise. Even in perfect lighting conditions, the snaps produced aren’t even enough to quickly scan a document.

If you happen to have a smartphone, use it - this is a camera experience only for true masochists.