Amazon Kindle Fire HD hands-on: First look

Amazon Kindle Fire HD 10

The 10" tablet has basically the same hardware, except the screen has grown to 10.1" (still at 1,280 x 800px). It's not as sharp (149ppi) but the image quality is still very good. Amazon has put on an "advanced polarizing filter," which should improve sunlight legibility, unfortunately we couldn't take the tablet outside.

Amazon Kindle Fire HD 10

You get more base storage, 16GB, plus a 32GB option with a microSD slot available if you need more. That's about all the extra cash buys you though, the chipset is the same and it's still weighed down by the limited RAM - 1GB. Same camera setup and so on too.

Amazon Kindle Fire HD 10

The Amazon Kindle Fire HD 10 measures 7.7mm thick and weighs 432g. It's only available in Black and White though and as before the glossy black option instantly becomes a smudgy mess.

Amazon Fire TV

The Fire TV Stick may be Amazon's answer to the Chromecast, but the Fire TV is the more interesting of the two - Amazon shows it off as the cheapest 4K streamer, the only one under $100. In case you missed it, the new Chromecast is capped at 1080p and so is the Fire TV Stick.

Consumers in the US, UK and Germany will be able to enjoy 4K content, but the new Fire TV also doubles as a home digital assistant. The included remote control has a mic, allowing it to interact with Alexa. You can use it to look up a movie to watch, ask it questions such as the weather or general facts or anything else you can do with Amazon's virtual assistant on the Echo.

Amazon Fire TV

The Amazon Fire TV has Wi-Fi ac with two antennas so your 4K streams will never be choppy and the player even preloads what it guesses you want to watch so you can start immediately, no buffering (people with data capped home Internet beware).

The player internals are quite beefy too, it packs 75% more processing power than its predecessor and it's more powerful than the Kindle tablets. It has MediaTek chipset but the CPU is clocked higher and there's 2GB of RAM.

You also get 8GB of internal memory, expandable with microSD cards. The Fire TV supports Dolby and multi-channel audio, including 7.1ch HDMI pass-through.