The ~$100 tablet shootout—Amazon Fire 8 HD Plus vs. Walmart Onn 8 Tablet Pro

[Karlston]

The ~$100 tablet shootout—Amazon Fire 8 HD Plus vs. Walmart Onn 8 Tablet Pro

The benchmarks are comparable to 2015 phones, but $100 Android tablets have come a long way.

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Amazon versus Walmart! Two of the world's biggest retailers compete in endless ways, but they're currently going head-to-head in an unexpected market: dirt-cheap Android tablets. And after spending some time recently with the $109.99 Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus and the $99.99 Walmart Onn Tablet 8 Pro, these two cheap tablets look like a microcosm of the companies' retail efforts at large. Walmart is the old-school brick-and-mortar outfit doing its best to keep up with the modern times, while Amazon is the trailblazing technology company and has been doing this tech-focused tablet thing for a long time.

Cheap, but useful

The designs of the two tablets could not be more different. Amazon is on its 10th generation of Android tablets and has the hardware design down to a science. This is only Walmart's second-generation Onn tablet, and it's mostly a cookie-cutter device that has room for improvement. While Amazon wins on hardware, its tablets also come with Fire OS, a fork of Android (Android 9) that doesn't have the Play Store, Google apps, or a huge app selection. Getting the apps I've wanted has been a nonstop sideloading fest, and Fire OS, since it was designed by a retail company, often acts like its primary goal is to get you to spend money with Amazon. Walmart, on the other hand, ships regular-old Google Play Android, which is much less of a hassle to use, has a much bigger app selection, and is actually a newer version: Android 10.

 

SPECS AT A GLANCE
	Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus	Walmart Onn 8 Tablet Pro
SCREEN	8-inch 1280×800 (189 ppi) LCD	8-inch 1280×800 (189 ppi) LCD
OS	Android 9 with Fire OS	Android 10
CPU	MediaTek MT8168   (Four Cortex A53s, 2GHz)	MediaTek MT8768   (Eight Cortex A53s, 2GHz)
GPU	Mali-G52 MC1	PowerVR Rogue GE8320
RAM	3GB	2GB
STORAGE	32GB or 64GB	32GB
NETWORKING	802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS
PORTS	USB Type-C, headphone jack
REAR CAMERAS	5MP	5MP
FRONT CAMERA	5MP	5MP
BATTERY	4850mAh	4500mAh
OTHER PERKS	Micro SD slot

 

Amazon's Fire tablet is designed primarily for horizontal mode—so it's a media tablet—while Walmart's tablet is designed for vertical mode, which means big phone apps. With auto-rotate, of course, you can use both tablets in either direction, but what you can't change is the location of the hardware components, and you'll see the camera, speakers, power button, and volume buttons arranged differently on each tablet since they favor different orientations. The Walmart Onn 8 Pro is a vertical tablet with two speakers on the bottom edge, so in landscape mode, they aren't really "stereo" speakers since they'll both point out the same side of the device. The Fire tablet, when held in landscape mode, has two speakers on left and right sides of the top edge, so they're roughly in line with your ears. You've got to pick a primary orientation for the speakers, and it's hard to argue against landscape, which is the primary orientation for media and maybe half the games. So that's a point for Amazon.

 

In just about every aspect, Walmart's tablet is as generic as possible, and the body sticks with this trend: it's pretty much just a rectangle with straight sides and lightly rounded corners. There's nothing wrong with it, but nothing special about it either. On the other hand, the Fire HD 8 Plus represents Amazon's 10th generation of tablets, and the company definitely knows what it's doing. The Fire 8 Plus has big, bulbous sides that puff out past the display cover and fit into your palms without any pressure points. The pillowy sides mean the tablet won't dig into your hands the way a more rectangular design would, and since this is a tablet meant for media consumption that you'll be holding for an extended period of time, this is a big deal.

 

I've yet to find a teardown of the Fire 8 HD Plus, but Amazon also seems to be doing its best to simplify the internal design. Most major components are in a single cluster, with the headphone jack, USB-C port, microphone, power button, and volume button all on the same edge. Flip the tablet over and you'll find the rear camera in the same spot, along with one of the speakers. Everything is squished to the right side of the tablet, with the front camera and left speaker being the only remote components.

 

At around $100, these are both cheap tablets, and one of the things that immediately jumped out at me about both of them were the plastic screens. Compared to the usual glass covers on phones and tablets, the plastic display cover has noticeably more friction, so sliding my finger around isn't as easy as I'd like. The plastic cover is also a fingerprint magnet, lacking the oleophobic coating that typically comes on a more expensive device. There's also a lot more give to a plastic display than a glass one, and if you press hard on them, you can actually affect the LCD pixels. It's all a major difference compared to an unbending, literally rock-hard glass display.

 

Both displays are also not the clearest, brightest things on Earth because the displays are not bonded to the display cover. There is an air gap between the cover and the LCD, which scatters some of the light from the LCD. Compared to the usual glass phone with a bonded display, these tablets are dimmer, cloudier, and have a smaller viewing angle. All the phones I'm thinking of are several times the price of these tablets, though, so it's an excusable difference, though it's a major one.

 

The justifiable cheapness continues in the tablet bodies, where you'll find both are plastic with a good amount of squish to them. Walmart prefers a smooth finish with a silver flake paint that looks like it came from a Radio Shack, while Amazon has a matte black plastic with a slight texture to it. Again, Amazon is better at this.

 

Fire OS—Basically a take-home Amazon shopping cart

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The biggest difference between the two tablets boils down to Google Play Android versus Amazon's Fire OS. Walmart is shipping a device with Google Play and all the Google apps, like YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, and the Google Assistant. We know Google gives OEMs a small kickback on revenue earned from a device, but it's nothing compared to what Amazon has going with the Fire tablet.

 

The Fire HD 8 Plus uses a non-Google Play version of Android. Amazon has been building its own alternative Android ecosystem, from scratch, since 2011. Both of these devices are about $100, but Amazon has an opportunity to make much more money from the device over the device's lifetime. Nearly every packed-in app on the Fire tablet pushes you to pay more for an Amazon product or service:

• The only app store on the device is the Amazon App Store, where Amazon gets a 30 percent cut of the revenue.
• There are ads on the lockscreen.
• The first app in the app list is "Shop Amazon," and there's a tab for Amazon.com on the Silk Browser home page.
• Prime Video is one of the only services you get with an Amazon Prime subscription, a $12.99-a-month service.
• "Amazon FreeTime" is a book, video, and game content service for kids, and it runs another $2.99 a month for Prime members.
• "Amazon Music Unlimited" is $7.99 a month on top of Prime, and it offers streaming of 60 million songs.
• "Kindle Unlimited," a book subscription service, is $9.99 a month.
• Audible, the popular audiobook service, is another $14.95 per month.
• Kindle Newsstand will sell you subscriptions to magazines.
• There's even an app for Jeff Bezos' The Washington Post, which runs $3.99 a month for a subscription.

Amazon isn't evil for having several content stores with all-you-can-eat subscription plans. Google offers some of the same services, like selling apps, books, music, magazines, and videos. The difference is that Google's content stores are mostly an afterthought, and services like Maps, Gmail, Drive, Photos, Docs, and Calendar are real productivity apps that offer a ton of functionality for free. Amazon makes it feel like the entire purpose of a Fire device is to buy more stuff from Amazon.

 

Every time you turn on the device, you first see an ad, usually for some Amazon service. The home screen is basically dedicated to buying stuff from Amazon, too. The home screen is tabbed, and swiping horizontally on the home screen will switch between content stores. After your app collection, there are tabs for Books, Videos, Games and Apps, Shop, Music, Audible, and Newsstand.

 

Even the app list is just a list of things to buy. Nearly every app in the app drawer is an Amazon service, while the actual productivity apps—like the clock, contacts, calendar, calculator, maps, docs, and weather—are tucked away in a folder called "Utilities." The first app in the app drawer is "Shop Amazon," followed by the Amazon Silk Browser, App Store, and Prime Video. Forget about alphabetical order—I think the apps are sorted by revenue. There is no way to change this, other than manually dragging apps around. Even if you don't tap on the app icons, you'll also be inundated with notifications from these apps, imploring you to buy something or check out some new promotion.

 

The Fire Tablet has all the usual building blocks of an Android device—those blocks are just stacked into the shape of a shopping cart. The result is an OS that feels like a pushy salesman rather than a tool that helps you get stuff done. If Amazon wasn't so good about keeping your credit card details on file, I would feel like the Fire HD should come with a card swiper on the side.

 

Google has some similar and competing services to what Amazon offers, but regular Android absolutely does not have the "pushy salesman" vibe that FireOS gives off. Android doesn't show ads on the lock screen. The home screen is not a collection of un-customizable tabs showing things you can buy from Google. Normally, you could replace the terrible home screen with a third-party option, but Amazon actually disabled the ability to set a different default home app. The Fire home screen is a big Amazon ad, and Amazon doesn't want users to replace it.

 

The Amazon App Store policies actually ban "Apps that override the native user experience." It's a vague rule that could mean anything, but Amazon uses it to block competing home screens and browsers from the app store, along with banning any app, at all, that uses home-screen widgets. Alternative media apps from giant companies are OK though, so you'll still find Netflix, Disney+, and Spotify in the Amazon App Store.

 

With all of the Amazon ads and protectionism, it would be nice if Amazon cut consumers a break with the price of the hardware. But there's nothing on the Fire tablet you can point to as being more expensive than Walmart's tab. They are more comparable than not, and the Fire tablet is $10 more. From a consumer perspective, there is nothing positive about Fire OS. If you like any of the Amazon apps, they are also on the Play Store.

Walmart’s jank build of Android

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Walmart is shipping a modern version of Android: Android 10. And it's mostly normal-looking other than one big oddity and a few rough edges.

 

Say you're an out-of-touch Walmart executive trying to do your best Amazon impression, and you need to find some premium Android ad space for your innovative new Walmart apps. Where do you put it? The lock screen? The home screen? The notification panel? No, I've got the perfect spot: The navigation bar. While any other screen is something you'd only visit occasionally, the navigation bar is on every. single. screen.

 

Yes, that's right, in an effort to be as obnoxious as possible, Walmart put a Walmart button on the navigation panel. It's awful.

 

The Walmart button is the first item in the navigation bar, pushing the main buttons, back, home, and recent apps, to the right, resulting in an ugly, off-center-looking button arrangement. The button doesn't even do that much—it opens a sparse-looking screen with four Walmart app icons. Walmart tried to make it less of a blatant ad by making this screen a "Favorites" page, where you can press the plus button and add more apps to it, but I already have a place for my favorite apps (it's called the home screen) and I don't need to activate it by pressing a Walmart button. What Walmart didn't think about, though, is that the navigation bar is only an option in Android 10. You can switch to gesture navigation, and then this navigation bar ad goes away.

 

Other than the navigation bar oddity, the rest of the OS is fine even if it feels like an amateurish build of AOSP. The square icons and teal color highlights are just the AOSP defaults, and they don't really match the rest of Android (round icons and blue highlights) anymore. The margins for the notification panel are wrong. The system settings have this weird bug where they list "null" in the search result breadcrumbs.

 

There is a special app for OTA updates called "Wireless Update" with the package name of "com.adups.fota." Adups has been featured in Ars before, when, according to mobile security firm Kryptowire, the Chinese company was caught shipping spyware on Blu Android devices sold in the US. Kryptowire said Adups software would collect text messages, location data, and call logs, and it would then send that data to a server in China. The FTC agreed with the claims and flagged Blu for deceptive representation regarding its use of personal data and deceptive data security, all thanks to Adups' actions. Blu ended up settling with the FTC.

 

Adups still shows up in plenty of cheap Chinese devices, and the company says previous data collection was a mistake. Adups on the Walmart tablet did not seem like it was doing anything immediately evil, but as the OTA updater, it has full control over the device. That means it can do things like silently install apps without the users' consent.

 

Performance

These are Android devices that are pretty much as cheap as you can get, and they perform like it. The two tablets are both chuggy-but-usable when things are going well behind the scenes, but be prepared for the occasional long pause.

 

There isn't a huge difference in performance because there isn't a huge difference in overall specs. The Amazon Fire 8 HD Plus is sporting a 3GB of RAM and a MediaTek MT8168 SoC—four ARM Cortex A53 cores at 2GHz—while the Walmart Onn 8 Pro has 2GB of RAM and a MediaTek MT8768—eight ARM Cortex A53 cores at 2GHz. You might expect the Walmart tablet to do well thanks to double the core count, but that doesn't really matter. Single-threaded performance makes the biggest difference, and in that area the two tablets are even. The 2GB of RAM also stops the Walmart tablet from being some kind of multitasking savant.

 

Of course, these tablets will get absolutely crushed in benchmarks by a high-end smartphone, but we've included the numbers for fun anyway. I also wanted to see how far back you would have to go to get comparable numbers from a high-end smartphone... and I ended up dusting off numbers from the Nexus 5X, a five-year-old device.

 

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Better hardware versus less hassle

If you haven't played with a cheap tablet recently, the real surprise here is that both tablets are viable, useful devices. The screens could be better, and they could be faster, but for only $100, they're a great secondary device, project tablet, or good for a kid. The $100 tablet has come a long way since our first look at this category back in 2010.

 

If you're an advanced user and are OK jumping through a few hoops, you can even sideload a handful of Google apps on the Fire tablet to get the Play Store up and running, but you'll still never be able to set a new home screen. And getting everything to work in that situation isn't as easy as just sideloading some apps. Even with the Play Store running, Google apps still failed to receive messages or sync in the background for me (even after messing with permissions to boot). I'm sure it would be fixable, but the point is it isn't as simple as just sideloading, so you should be ready for some Googling and troubleshooting to make everything work. And even if you can make this work, you'll still be fighting the OS's inability to set a home app. Workarounds via accessibility hacks are simply not as good as the real thing.

 

I wish there was a best-of-both-worlds option here, combining the better design of the Amazon tablet with a OS that isn't so user-hostile and allows for customization. But when faced with the realities of Amazon's OS, I think it becomes kind of a toss-up between these two tablets. If you want the least amount of hassle, buy the Walmart tablet, which comes with Google Play and all your favorite apps. The Amazon tablet is definitely superior hardware, but you'll constantly be fighting the Amazon OS.

 

 

The ~$100 tablet shootout—Amazon Fire 8 HD Plus vs. Walmart Onn 8 Tablet Pro

 

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