Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus review: one of the best value tablets you can buy

The Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus is an easy pick for any best tablets list: it continues the well established tradition of Amazon's great value Fire tablet line, while also offering a few useful extras that might interest those of you after something a bit more advanced.

This Plus edition of the tablet is new this year, and arrives alongside a standard Amazon Fire HD 10, an upgrade on the previous model from 2019. Go for the Plus, and you get an extra gigabyte of RAM, a soft touch slate-coloured back, and support for wireless charging.

Otherwise you already pretty much know what to expect from the Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus – it's an inexpensive, reliable, well-built tablet that is perfect for watching movies and shows, for browsing the web, and maybe even for doing a little bit of work on the side.

Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus: price and availability

The Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus is available now from Amazon: the widgets on this page should link you directly to the best prices currently available, but the official RRP for the tablet is £189.99/$189.99 for the 32GB storage model and £229.99/$229.99 for the 64GB storage model.

Those prices are £30/$30 more than the standard Amazon Fire HD 10, and we think it's worth the upgrade. If you're happy with Amazon adverts on the lock screen while you're using your tablet, you can get £10/$10 off the prices quoted above.

Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus review: screen and design

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The Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus is a reasonably attractive-looking slab of electronics, though those thick bezels around the display tell you that this is very much a budget device. It doesn't quite have the premium feel of something like the 10.2-inch iPad – the Amazon tablet is 1.7 mm or 0.06 inches thicker, for a start – but it's well put together and feels like it's going to last you through many years of use.

The soft touch slate backing is exclusive to the Plus model, as we've mentioned, and it adds some extra quality to proceedings. At 468 grams (that's 1.03 lbs) we'd say it's lightweight enough to be used in one hand for an extended period of time, though most of the time you'll probably be holding it in the landscape orientation (the integrated 2MP, 720p webcam is positioned to work in landscape mode). What you don't get here, and nor would you expect it at this sort of price, is any kind of waterproofing or dustproofing.

The buttons and ports are mostly clustered on the right hand side, if you're holding the tablet in landscape mode with the webcam at the top: you've got the volume buttons, the power buttons, the USB-C port and the 3.5mm headphone jack all together, which feels a bit crowded. There's also a microSDXC slot on the bottom (in this orientation), and a pair of stereo speakers – which output a decent level of sound – on the top.

When it comes to the screen, it's the same as the rest of the design: fine, but no more than that. The 10.1-inch, IPS LCD, 1,920 x 1,200 pixel display lacks the brightness, contrast and richness of the very best panels on the market – and you don't get nice extras such as HDR – but it's bright and crisp enough for everyday use. While some more pixels would be welcome for browsing the web and working on documents, there are no problems when it comes to sitting back and watching some videos.

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Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus: performance and features

You get 4GB of RAM – the most ever included on a Fire tablet – and either 32GB or 64GB of storage with the Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus (and you can expand that with a memory card). That's all good, but the Mediatek MT8183 Helio P60T processor is the same one that powered the 2019 version of this tablet, which is a bit disappointing: don't expect blistering performance here, and you will notice occasional lag when switching between apps and screens. It's all relative though, and you have to remember the very affordable price of this tablet when assessing its various pros and cons.

The tablet runs Fire OS, which is Amazon's own take on Android: you miss out on all the Google apps and a lot of standard apps from the Play Store, but you can find apps like Netflix, Spotify, Disney Plus and Dropbox here. There's also Microsoft Office, and Amazon is selling a bundled Plus tablet with Office and a Bluetooth keyboard to try and appeal to mobile workers – it's okay in that particular role, but if you're serious about getting work done on the go, there are better options than this.

As has always been the case with these Fire tablets, the Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus is best for sitting back and watching some Prime Video content, or playing a few lightweight games (if you can find enough that you like in the Amazon App Store), or browsing the web. A mention too for Alexa, built right into the Fire HD 10 Plus and getting smarter all the time – if you buy the extra wireless charging stand, you can actually turn this tablet into something like an Echo Show 10.

Amazon reckons you can get 12 hours of battery life between charges from the Fire HD 10 Plus, which seems about right based on our testing, but not by much. An hour of video streaming at full display brightness knocks the battery down by about 7 percent, suggesting you'll get 14 hours of use between charges – gaming and more intense app use will lower that number, but this is still a tablet that you'll be able to use all day without worrying about having to recharge it.

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Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus review: price and verdict

Everything we already knew about the Amazon Fire tablets is true about this one: they're great for accessing Amazon apps and services (particularly Alexa and Prime Video), they're very cheap, and they won't let you down. The Fire HD 10 Plus is the model to go for if you want as much RAM as possible (handy for smooth switching between multiple apps), and you want that big 10.1-inch display, and you like the idea of wireless charging.

There are also limitations to bear in mind – and again, these limitations aren't new. Performance isn't the best, the design and screen are good rather than great, and you're not going to find all of the Android apps that you might be used to from the Google Play Store. Amazon hasn't really done enough to make this a serious device for working and multitasking – for anything other than casual use, you're still going to be better off paying more for an Apple iPad or a Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 Plus.

We have to go back to that price though because it is very much on the low side. It's so low that we can easily live with whatever shortcomings the Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus has: the stuff that it can do, it does very well, and without leaving a huge hole in your bank balance. For a lot of people, this is going to be all the tablet that they need, and the question is why they would pay more for something more expensive.

We appreciate the efforts Amazon has made to position this as a more powerful device, with a Microsoft Office and Bluetooth keyboard bundle, but there isn't really the software or the hardware power here to make this a serious portable computer. If you can live with that, and you know the Amazon App Store has all of the streaming and entertainment apps you need, this might well be the perfect tablet for you.

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