The HD 10 doesn’t have all the super-fancy gimmicks that the latest versions of Android do, such as a split-screen function. And Amazon probably realizes watching video media is going to be the Fire’s main use for more people than reading is. Of course, a fatter screen like the iPad’s or Teclast‘s might make for a better form factor for e-reading, but 16:9 is good enough without wasting more screen real estate than necessary for people who do want to watch movies. The screen’s 16:9 form factor makes it ideally suited for video applications. The sound from the miniscule built-in stereo speakers is necessarily a little tinny, but still audible in a quiet room-and there are always the earphone jack or Bluetooth if you need to hear a little better. The tablet also does well at playing movies on its 1080p high-definition screen. They’re only about 80% the size of the original printed page (if the original printed page was 8.5″ x 11″), but unless the book is in fine print it’s usually easy enough to read. And the large size of the screen means that PDFs are generally legible, too, if you read them a page at a time. How is the HD 10 for e-reading? Terrific! It’s got a large, clear, high-resolution display, so ebooks on its built-in Kindle and “Docs” apps look just fine-and so do ebooks on Nook, Google Play Books, or any other sideloaded e-reading app. If they do appear, I’ll try contacting Amazon support and seeing if they can disable them for free just as they did for my other two Fires. I’m not sure that’s going to last, though-it may be that they load the ads once a day so I wouldn’t get them until tomorrow. One other observation is that the lock screen doesn’t seem to be showing ads yet. The launcher I have works well enough for me for now, though. Perhaps I’ll look into one of the alternate launchers that can apparently be customized to have a Google Now panel. The functionality is duplicated within the Google app, of course, but I did like having it at my fingertips for a finger swipe. This may have something to do with how Google is reportedly in the process of killing off the Google Now Launcher I’m not sure. One other thing that’s a bit annoying is that the swipe-left “Google Now” panel of the Google Now Launcher doesn’t seem to work. I noticed that the Inbox app still doesn’t work properly, so I’ll still be using the built-in Mail app, but I guess that’s not too bad. Before too long, my HD 10 was set up in the same way as my HD 8. I did notice that I needed to run Google Play before I was able to obtain the Google Services ID number, and updated that post accordingly I also had to reboot a couple of times during the Launcherhijack process but found that the current version, 4.0.2, does work just fine with this current Fire.Īfter that, it was just a matter of re-downloading all the apps I’m currently using from the Google Play Store (or, in a couple of cases, Amazon-for some reason, the current Google Play version of Netflix isn’t compatible with the Fire, but Amazon’s version is), and reorganizing them in the Google Now launcher. Those were, in fact, the first things I did on getting the tablet: I went back to my old instructional posts on installing Google Play, registering the tablet with Google, and installing the new launcher-and they worked like a charm. And it’s got the same capacity to be upgraded with the Google Play services and a new launcher. It’s got the same quality of cameras and speakers, the same launcher and app store, the same SD card capability. The HD 10 is, in every way that counts, simply a bigger Fire. The contents of the Fire HD 10 carton: the tablet, 9 watt adapter, USB cable, and pamphlets.

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