Amazon 7-inch Fire Tablet Review: Here's What $50 Delivers

The 2015 7-inch Fire tablet runs on a MediaTek MT8127 D quad-core processor, Mali-450 GPU, and 1GB of RAM. This hardware combination is driving a 1024x600 resolution screen. None of these parts are high-end, but they’re adequate for a basic user.

For browsing, Amazon uses the Silk browser which is based on the open source Chromium project. Silk divides the processing between the tablet’s hardware and Amazon Web Services (AWS). By utilizing AWS, Amazon is able to pre-process web pages, apply predictive algorithms, and route traffic through proxy servers to help pages load more quickly.

CPU testing iOS and Android CPU testing

Unfortunately the benefits of Silk’s architecture don’t always carry over to benchmarks. Amazon’s 7-inch Fire tablet finds itself at the bottom of our JetStream chart. And since we’ve only recently switched to JetStream, the Fire tablet is the only tablet currently in this comparison chart.

Amazon’s 7-inch Fire tablet earns a spot that’s close to the middle of our comparison chart in Rightware’s latest version of BrowserMark. The 7-inch Fire tablet is one of only a few tablets in our comparison chart.

In Geekbench, the 7-inch Fire manages to surpass the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 8 and avoid last place. Higher end tablets outscore the 7-inch Fire tablet by a decent margin in this test.

Although the Silk browser and 7-inch Fire tablet didn’t top our web-browsing benchmark charts, real-world performance was acceptable. The Silk browser did a fine job at displaying web pages with reasonable page load times and smooth pinch-to-zoom performance.