Amazon 7-inch Fire Tablet Review: Here's What $50 Delivers

You’ll find two cameras on the 7-inch Fire tablet. The front-facing camera is a VGA model while the back shooter features 2-megapixels. With these resolutions, neither camera is going to be ideal for capturing life’s precious moments but they should be adequate for video chats or Instagram images. The rear-facing camera does offer HDR capabilities along with the ability to capture panoramic and lenticular images. You can also change the photo ratio from 16:9 to 4:3. We didn’t expect the 7-inch Fire tablet to offer many camera options or features, so we were pleasantly surprised to find these controls.

   

   

In looking at our sample images, you’ll notice they often lack definition and the camera occasionally struggles to maintain focus. The rear-facing camera isn’t anything to gush over, but it may be suitable for sharing an image or two on Facebook. For keepsake shots, you’ll want to grab a dedicated point-and-shoot camera or a smartphone that has a better integrated camera.

Battery Life

According to Amazon, the 7-inch Fire tablet should last for up to 7 hours of reading, surfing the web, watching video, and listening to music. Amazon also claims you’ll be able to fully charge the tablet in under 6 hours using the included microUSB power adapter.

To get a feel for how the 7-inch Fire tablet’s battery life compares to other tablets, we ran it through our standard web-browsing test which offers a best-case scenario. In this test, we cycle a page ever few minutes with screen brightness set to 50% and Wi-Fi enabled. Bluetooth is turned off and the tablet is forced to keep the display on for the entire test. The tablet is then monitored for uptime duration.

In our web browsing test, the 7-inch Fire tablet managed to last for 8 hours and 20 minutes before giving up. This surpasses Amazon’s claim and provides solid up-time for the 7-inch Fire tablet’s target market.

In real-world use, the 7-inch Fire tablet had no problem lasting for a full day of casual workload while surfing the web, playing games, listening to music, taking pictures, etc. Of course, your battery life will vary depending on your specific use case.