~ $ 100 Tablet Shootout: Amazon Fire 8 HD Plus vs. Walmart Onn 8 Tablet Pro

Amazon versus Walmart! Two of the world’s largest retailers compete in infinite ways, but they are currently facing each other in an unexpected market – very cheap Android tablets. And after spending time recently with the $ 109.99 Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus and $ 99.99 Walmart Onn Tablet 8 Pro, these two cheap tablets look like a microcosm of the companies’ overall retail efforts. Walmart is the old-school brick and mortar team that does its best to keep up with modern times, while Amazon is the pioneering tech company and has been making this tech-focused tablet for a long time.

Cheap but useful

The designs of the two tablets could not be more different. Amazon is in its 10th generation of Android tablets and has the hardware design down to science. This is just Walmart’s second-generation Onn tablet, and it’s primarily a cookie-cutter that has room for improvement. While Amazon wins in hardware, its tablets also come with Fire OS, an Android fork (Android 9) that doesn’t have a Play Store, Google apps, or a huge selection of apps. Getting the apps you wanted has been a non-stop side-loading festival, and Fire OS, being designed by a retail company, often acts as its primary goal is to get you to spend money with Amazon. Walmart, on the other hand, includes older Google Play Android, which is much less complicated to use, has a much larger selection of apps, and is actually a newer version: Android 10.

Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus and Walmart Onn 8 Tablet Pro

Buy now
Fire HD 8 Plus: $ 110 at AmazonOnn 8 Tablet Pro: $ 99 at Walmart

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Amazon’s Fire tablet is primarily designed for landscape mode, making it a multimedia tablet, while Walmart’s tablet is designed for portrait mode, which means great 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 from differently on each tablet as 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 are not really “stereo” speakers as they will both point to the same side of the device. The Fire tablet, when held in landscape mode, has two speakers on the left and right sides of the top edge, so they are more or less in line with your ears. You have to choose a main orientation for the speakers, and it’s hard to argue against the landscape, which is the main orientation for the media and maybe half of the games. So that’s a point for Amazon.

In almost every respect, the Walmart tablet is as generic as possible, and the body follows this trend – it’s practically a rectangle with straight sides and slightly rounded corners. There is nothing wrong, but there is nothing special either. On the other hand, Fire HD 8 Plus represents the tenth generation of Amazon tablets, and the company definitely knows what it’s doing. The Fire 8 Plus has large, bulbous sides that swell beyond the screen cover and fit your palms without any pressure point. The padded sides mean the tablet won’t sink into your hands like a more rectangular design would, and since this is a media-consuming tablet that you’ll keep for an extended period of time, this is a big problem.

I have 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 place, along with one of the speakers. Everything is squashed to the right side of the tablet, with the front camera and left speaker being the only remote components.

For around $ 100, these are cheap tablets, and one of the things that immediately caught my eye on both of them was the plastic screens. Compared to the usual glass covers on phones and tablets, the plastic screen cover has noticeably higher friction, so sliding your finger is not as easy as I would like. The plastic cover is also a fingerprint magnet, which lacks the oleophobic coating that usually comes in a more expensive device. There’s also a lot more to a plastic screen than a glass one, and pressing hard on them can affect the pixels on the LCD. It is a huge difference compared to a literally rigid and flexible glass screen.

Both screens are also not the clearest and brightest things on Earth because the screens are not attached to the screen cover. There is an air gap between the cover and the LCD screen, which scatters some of the light from the LCD screen. Compared to the usual glass phone with a built-in display, these tablets are dimmer, cloudier, and have a smaller viewing angle. However, all the phones I am thinking of are several times the price of these tablets, so it is an excusable difference, although it is important.

The justifiable low price continues on the tablet bodies, where you’ll find that both are plastic with a good amount of crushing. Walmart prefers a smooth finish with a silver flake paint that appears to come from a Radio Shack, while Amazon has a matte black plastic with a slight texture. Again, Amazon is better at this.