Best Amazon Fire Tablets

The display quality and performance speeds are limited, too, but Asedillo says they’re acceptable for everyday tasks such as reading, web browsing, movie streaming, and standard game play.

On the other hand, if you’re already on the hook for a $119-per-year Amazon Prime subscription, Fire tablets provide you with easy access to movies, music, and books.

And FireOS has a good parental control system, called Amazon Kids, to help you manage content and screen time for your children. Available free on all Fire tablets, it also lets you subscribe to thousands of kid-friendly movies, TV shows, books, and apps via Amazon’s Kids+ service, which starts at $5 a month for a single account (or $3 a month for Prime members).

Fire tablets go on sale on Amazon’s retail platform quite regularly (particularly the Fire 7 and Fire 8 HD). And you can score even more savings if you can put up with ads. Every Fire Tablet is available with a $15 discount if you buy a version that shows ads from Amazon on the lock screen.

So what’s the best Amazon Fire tablet for you? That depends on just what you’re looking for. 

All of the tablets in our ratings are graded on almost 240 data points on various criteria like display, versatility, convenience, and more. And like everything else we test at CR, they’re purchased at retail to make sure we’re using the exact same product you would buy.

For more information on tablets, see CR’s tablets buying guide and check out our full tablet ratings to see how over 30 models performed in our tests.