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The latest Amazon Fire HD 8, updated last month and starting at $100, is a modest refresh, offering more RAM, a nominally upgraded camera and some new AI features. The general sales pitch, however, remains the same: You get a just-competent tablet for the essentials at a dirt-cheap (and often-discounted) price, and in exchange, Amazon gets to plant another appliance for its own apps and services in your home. Nothing about this update drastically changes that agreement, but after using the tablet for the past month (and after using older Fire tablets for years prior), it may be time to demand more from Amazons end of the bargain. Its definitely a cheap tablet Physically, the new Fire HD 8 is nearly identical to the last one. It is, without a doubt, A Budget Tablet its nowhere near premium, but it doesnt feel distractingly cheap either. At just under eight inches tall and 0.37 inches thick, its small enough for most kids to operate without much struggle and most adults to carry with one hand. If you care more about your tablets travel-friendliness than its virtues as a miniature TV, this size should be fine. The whole thing is lightweight at 0.74 pounds, so its not an anchor in your bag. Its textured plastic frame is somewhat slippery but altogether sturdy, with no creaking or flexing. Its gently rounded edges dig comfortably into your palms. There are fairly thick bezels around the display, but Ive never minded those on a tablet they give your thumbs a natural place to rest. The display wont win any awards. Its the same LCD panel Amazon has trotted out in previous generations, with the same 1,280 x 800 resolution. If youve used any iPad, or even many midrange Android tablets, in the last decade, everything about it will be an obvious downgrade. The meager pixel density (189 ppi) makes images and text visibly less sharp. Colors are more muted, too. It doesnt get bright enough to be totally usable in direct sunlight; you can read it comfortably on the couch, but dont expect it to work as well by the pool. Its also a smudge and fingerprint magnet. The back of the Amazon Fire HD 8 is composed of a sturdy, if mildly slippery, textured plastic. Jeff Dunn for Engadget Again, though, the Fire HD 8 is competing in a different weight class than even an older iPad. The fact that the screen is relatively small makes the lower resolution at least tolerable. You can watch Netflix or read Kindle books and not think man, this sucks the whole time, especially if you bought the thing for well under $100. There are other hardware compromises. The speakers arent all that loud and struggle to fully separate different parts of songs. Theyre entirely on the left edge when you hold the tablet vertically, which always sounds odd. Theres an old USB-C 2.0 port for charging and a glacially slow 5W power adapter in the box. Amazon says itll take about five hours to fully charge the tablet with that; you can cut the wait in half if you bring your own 15W charger, though thats still not fast. Theres no water resistance rating, so youll need to be careful if you ever want to read in the tub. Both the five-megapixel rear camera and 2MP front camera are brutal, washing out colors and blurring fine details even in good lighting. (As always, please report anyone using their tablet as a camera to the nearest authorities.) Its not all bad. While the Fire HD 8 only comes with 32GB or 64GB of storage built in of which only 25GB or 54GB is usable, respectively you can add up to 1TB of additional space with a microSD card. The 13-inch iPad Pro, which starts at $1,299, does not let you do that (Im just saying!). The Fire HD 8 also has a headphone jack, which helps offset the mediocre speaker performance a little bit, plus theres Bluetooth for wireless headphones. And one benefit of the shoddy display resolution is that it makes the Fire HD 8 less power-hungry: Amazon rates the tablets battery life at up to 13 hours. I got much more than that in our (relatively forgiving) battery test, but closer to 10 or 11 hours with more strenuous use. Either way, its good. Most people can safely expect it to survive a day of basic streaming and web browsing. The Fire HD 8's rear camera has technically jumped from 2MP to 5MP and now supports 1080p video recording, but it still doesn't take photos you'd want to share. Jeff Dunn for Engadget The new Fire HD 8 runs on a 2 GHz six-core processor (the MediaTek MT8169A). The base model includes 32GB of storage and 3GB of RAM, while a $130 variant with twice the storage bumps the memory up to 4GB. I tested the former. The previous generation only came with 2GB of RAM the pricier Fire HD 8 Plus had 3GB so this is a welcome upgrade. That said, its not a huge boost. With the entry-level model, the gist is the same as its been with past Fire HD tablets: You can get by with simple video streaming, web browsing, reading and gaming, but therell be hitches and occasional crashes along the way, and itll never be powerful enough for serious work or reliable multitasking. The modern web is just too ad-heavy and grossly inefficient for a low-end chip like this, so youll inevitably have to deal with some choppiness when loading media-heavy sites like ESPN or The New York Times. Apps take just a bit longer to open than they would on a pricier tablet, and its not uncommon to get some lag when you jump back to the home screen. Still, for the money, its all workable. It doesnt take forever to open a Peacock stream or load an article on Engadget. The Mali-G52 GPU can even handle a decent level of gaming casual card and match-three games run fine, and even more involved fare like PUBG Mobile and Diablo Immortal are totally playable, albeit with severely low-res textures. On the Geekbench 5 benchmark, the Fire HD 8 earned a single-core score of 193 and a multi-core score of 907. That is lightyears away from impressive, but given that the last-gen version struggled to even complete the tests without crashing, its still a step up. One benefit of buying a cheap tablet: You usually get a headphone jack. Jeff Dunn for Engadget Ultimately, its about managing expectations. You dont buy a $100 tablet demanding a workhorse. When discounts bring that tablet's price below $60, not constantly annoying becomes a compliment. If you can afford the model with 4GB of RAM, that should hold up better over time. Then again, a device like this makes the most sense when its as cheap as possible. The ad-pocalypse that is Fire OS The Fire HD 8 still runs on Amazons Fire OS, a fork of Android 11 that uses a custom app store and is designed to put Amazons own apps and services in the spotlight. (For the record, stock Android is up to version 15.) The generous read is that many of those apps are popular, so having them all front and center can be convenient. If you often stream movies on Prime Video, use Amazon Music with a Prime subscription or own a bunch of Kindle ebooks or Audible audiobooks, all of it is right there. You can set up different user profiles also not available on an iPad including child accounts that present a curated selection of kid-friendly websites and videos. A fairly robust set of parental controls let you monitor your childs screen time within that. You can also call on Alexa and thus control various smart home devices hands-free, though Amazon has dropped support for the Show Mode that turned the tablet into a pseudo smart display. You can install Alexa and all of those Amazon services on any tablet, though. Most of Fire OS actual changes suck, and they have for years now. The app store plays a big part in that. It covers many of the big streaming and social media players Netflix, Hulu, TikTok, X, Max, Spotify, Disney+, etc. but still omits all Google apps, Reddit, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Slack, tons of games and any browser besides Amazons ultra-basic Silk, among many others. The lack of Google remains the biggest killer; Amazons stock email and calendar apps are far less robust than Gmail and Google Calendar, while the bootleg YouTube app is just a web shortcut. Left to right: one of Fire OS' lockscreen ads, a snapshot of the less-than-useful "For You" page and an example of the AI-powered "Wallpaper Creator" tool. Jeff Dunn for Engadget Its true that you can install the Google Play Store and download most of whats missing with a hacky workaround, but thats not the experience Amazon is selling (and not one most people will opt to do). I cant praise an OS that works best when you go behind its back. And as with many Android tablets, many of the apps that are supported look like blown-up phone apps more than experiences designed with a larger screen in mind. Because this is a tech product launching in 2024, the Fire HD 8 also comes with a few AI-centric features, including an automated wallpaper creator, a writing assist tool and webpage summaries in the Silk Browser. All of these perform reasonably fast, but Its hard to call them game-changers: The writing assist makes copy sound overly stilted, while the webpage summaries strip down most articles of their nuances (I beg you, just read the post.) The DALL-E-style wallpaper generator is neater, offering different styles and responding well to natural language requests, but I cnt get excited over AI art when theres so much of the real thing out there. More egregious are the ads. Oh, so many ads. Upon activating the tablet for the first time, I was greeted with a full-screen promo for BetMGM because what budget-conscious tablet buyer isnt looking to gamble their savings away and have since been bombarded with lockscreen ads to buy Toshiba hard drives, State Farm insurance and SteelSeries gaming keyboards. Thankfully, you can remove these for an extra $15, either upfront or after purchase. You can technically install the Google Play Store and get around some of Fire OS' app limitations, but it'll require a bit of legwork. Jeff Dunn for Engadget But the spirit of nickel-and-diming you goes beyond that. The first app you see is Shop Amazon. The home screen itself is split into two sections: For You and Home. The former is a page filled with content suggestions, a significant chunk of which are either sponsored apps, links to movies on Prime Video and songs on Amazon Music or calls to subscribe to Amazon services like Kids+, Luna and Audible. Some of these are free; many others are paid. At one point, I kid you not, it presented me with an ad to buy a different Fire tablet. The Home tab does have a traditional app grid, but above it is a Discover row that takes up the top 40 percent of the screen and delivers a similar range of not-so-personalized suggestions. As I write this, it includes a link to the Prime Video series Fallout, the sponsored app Vita Mahjong for Seniors, the Max app, links to two different thriller books from the author Frieda McFadden and a few other things Ive shown zero interest in over my time using Amazon services. Its a jumbled, undignified mess. Theres a distinct lack of care to Fire OS, a pervading sense that it doesnt so much have your best interest at heart it wants to needle cash-strapped customers into pumping more revenue into the Amazon machine. This just isnt the case with iPadOS or even stock Android. Actually pay attention to what Fire OS is doing, and it becomes difficult to see Fire tablets as anything but subsidized ad platforms Amazon can seed in homes on the cheap. If you want a product that treats you with a little more respect, you have to pay for it. The Fire HD 8 resting on top of a 13-inch iPad Air. Jeff Dunn for Engadget Wrap-up I get it, some of us just need to save some cash. And Amazon, fairly or not (i.e., not), can significantly undercut most other decent budget tablets on price. If cost is your number-one concern, you only want a tablet for casual media consumption and you can live with the unfiltered Amazon-ness of Fire OS, theres still value to be had here. Little about the Fire HD 8 is good, but much of it is fine for the price, and when that price is as bananas-cheap as $55 with deals, thats probably enough. So it goes. Just make sure the slate is on sale before you take the plunge. Otherwise, Id consider the 10.1-inch Fire HD 10, which has the same software annoyances but a sharper, roomier display, more CPU power and a touch more battery life. Either way, heres hoping Fire OS becomes less user-hostile one day.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/tablets/amazon-fire-hd-8-2024-review-a-cheap-tablet-hampered-by-outdated-software-141924425.html?src=rss
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Elon Musk has amended his lawsuit against OpenAI, adding more anti-trust claims against the company and including Microsoft as a defendant. He also added his company, xAI, as well as Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member and mother to three of his children, as plaintiffs. Musk originally sued OpenAI in March, accusing founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of violating the organization's non-profit mission by teaming up with Microsoft. He withdrew the state court lawsuit in June before suing OpenAI and Altman again in federal court. Musk was one OpenAI's earliest backers, and one of his arguments was that he was "betrayed by Mr. Altman and his accomplices." In response to his lawsuit, OpenAI published old emails from 2015 to 2018 in a blog post, wherein it claimed that Musk was involved in the planning when the company first explored transitioning into a for-profit structure. xAI's founder allegedly wanted majority equity, control of the initial board of directors and the CEO position and even suggested merging OpenAI with Tesla. Musk left the organization in 2018 before Microsoft invested the first billion in OpenAI. Since then, Microsoft has invested $13 billion in the generative AI firm, and OpenAI has taken steps to complete its transformation into a more traditional for-profit company with a non-profit arm. As TechCrunch notes, the amended lawsuit argues that OpenAI is "actively trying to eliminate competitors," including xAI, by making investors promise not to fund them. xAI has been harmed by OpenAI's and Microsoft's exclusive exchange of "competitively sensitive information," the lawsuit also says. Musk's new complaint names LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Microsoft VP Dee Templeton as defendants, as well, for being involved with both OpenAI and Microsoft boards. As for why Zilis was named as a plaintiff, the lawsuit says it's because the former OpenAI board member and current director of Neuralink repeatedly raised concerns over OpenAI's deals that were similar to Musks. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/elon-musk-adds-microsoft-as-defendant-in-his-lawsuit-against-openai-140023400.html?src=rss
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GM's robotaxi unit Cruise has agreed to pay a $500,000 for submitting a false accident report as part of a deferred prosecution agreement. The US Justice Department (DoJ) said that Cruise failed to disclose vital details about a serious October 2023 accident in which one of its vehicles struck a pedestrian and dragged her 20 feet after she was hit by another vehicle. "Federal laws and regulations are in place to protect public safety on our roads. Companies with self-driving cars that seek to share our roads and crosswalks must be fully truthful in their reports to their regulators, said Martha Boersch, Chief of the Office of the U.S. Attorneys Criminal Division. Uber has yet to comment on the matter. Under the terms of the three-year settlement, Cruise must cooperate with the government, put a safety compliance program into place and provide annual reports to the US Attorney's office. The company could still be prosecuted if it fails to comply with those conditions. Cruise was previously fined $1.5 million by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and reportedly reached a settlement with the victim worth at least $8 million. According to the US Attorney's office, a Cruise driverless vehicle operating in San Francisco ran over a pedestrian who had been thrown into its path after being struck by a separate, human-operated vehicle. The Cruise vehicle initially stopped after running over the pedestrian, but its systems failed to detect that she was still under the vehicle. It then tried to pull over to the side, dragging the woman over 20 feet. In Cruise's report to the NHTSA, it said nothing about dragging the victim after it struck her. (Cruise also omitted this information in statements to the press at the time of the accident.) Cruise was subsequently stripped of its license to operate self-driving vehicles in California. The company stopped all operations of both its driverless cars and its manned robotaxi service in order to engage in a comprehensive safety review. CEO Kyle Vogt resigned in November and GM announced plans to slash Cruise's funding and to restructure leadership based on external safety reviews. Nearly a quarter of the company's workforce was cut that in December. Cruise vehicles stayed off roads for several more months but returned to Arizona in April and to Houston in June under the supervision of human drivers. In September this year, Cruise recommenced operations in California, again with human drivers at the wheel. In August, the company said its self-driving vehicles would come to Uber starting next year.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/gms-cruise-will-pay-a-500000-fine-for-submitting-a-false-accident-report-133041789.html?src=rss
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