For $59 you get the base Fire 7 tablet with 16GB of storage, a quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM. That price also means that you have ads on your lock screen. If you want to eliminate those you need to pay $75, everything else remains the same. You can bump up to 32GB of storage for $79 and again it’s $15 more to get that version with no ads. The ads are tailored to you based on your usage of the tablet and aren’t intrusive once you unlock it, so you’ll need to decide whether it bothers you enough to pay the extra $15. That brings me to the positive side of the Fire 7’s design; it’s incredibly comfortable to hold with its rounded plastic edges and small form factor. At 9.9 ounces and 7.1 x 4.6 x 0.38 inches it will fit in anyone’s hands easily and doesn’t instill fear that you will drop it on yourself while laying in bed or on the couch. That makes the Fire 7 perfect for its intended role as a device for reading, watching videos, light web browsing or scrolling apps like TikTok. If you have loftier goals with your tablet then by all means take a look at our best cheap tablets or best tablets for larger and more powerful tablets that can do some productivity work as well, but that’s not the Fire 7. The Fire 7 (2022) boasts a brighter display than its predecessor, but otherwise, things remain solidly in the land of mediocrity. It fares the best when using it for reading or surfing the web, watching video gives away some of its limitations. Turning to our colorimeter for support, it showed the Fire 7 hitting 47% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. That’s pretty abysmal, with the Gateway 10.1-inch just beating it out at 50%, while the 80% tablet average looks down disapprovingly upon them both. Brightness is aptly the bright spot for the Fire 7 display at 421 nits. That outshines the 400-nit tablet average and the Gateway 10.1 (283 nits). This lets you easily use the Fire 7 in brightly lit environments, which is great if you want to read with it on the go for example. Looking at the flipside of the coin, the Fire 7 also offers a blue light reducing mode, easily accessible from the notification shade. That will help you avoid the dreaded sleep preventing blue light from your Fire 7 if you use it to read, browse the web or watch videos in bed. The single speaker integrated into the Fire 7 isn’t good, but I do have some good news on the audio front with the Fire 7. There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack and Bluetooth support for connecting wireless headphones and I would strongly recommend you do one of those two things. The speaker works for listening to spoken word content like Audible or podcasts or for Alexa to respond to you. But I stress that if you are looking to listen to music or get engrossed in a movie or show you have to either connect headphones or a speaker. One final note on audio, the hands-free Alexa experience is quite good, it’s like having a battery-powered Echo Dot that you can take anywhere and is particularly handy if you are using the tablet in the kitchen and have your hands dirty or wet. Alexa can’t live up to Google Assistant, but it’s at least on a par with if not better than Siri, so it’s a handy feature to have. The Fire 7 will instill in you a “we’ll get there” mentality or you will hurl it at the ground, it very much depends on your personality. I once again will bring you back to that $60 price, you aren’t getting something that will compete with the iPad (2021) or any other tablet that costs 5-10x the price of the Fire 7. Once you are in the Kindle app or watching a video this is all completely irrelevant though, as it handles these tasks without a hiccup. You can even do some light gaming, but think Subway Surfers and banish any recollection of Genshin Impact from your brain. The Fire 7 managed a Geekbench 5 overall performance score of 540, which sounds horribly low until I tell you that was more than double the 211 points the Gateway 10.1 managed. To quickly remind you of how different a scale we are operating on here the iPad (2021) scored 3,387 on this test. The rest of our performance and graphics tests either would not run or could not be installed on the Fire 7, again due to the inability to sideload apps by default. Just to close this section out, you should not buy the Fire 7 tablet with anything more than basic tasks in mind, but if you accept that it can offer a pleasant user experience. Here are a few samples to drive home my point. In absolutely full sunlight you might get a clear shot with the Fire 7, but anything less than that will be at least slightly grainy and low-light shots resemble a photo captured from a digital camera circa 2002 and that might be too generous. Here’s a shot from our garden in the mid-day sun and the colors are pretty dull and the background is somehow simultaneously grainy and blown out. The Fire 7 tablet comes with a 90-day limited warranty, but you can extend that to a 1-3 year warranty with accident protection for $7-$9.
Bottom line
If you are already a Prime subscriber, the Fire 7 tablet is a nice reminder of everything that comes with that subscription. If not, then you should absolutely subscribe if you are getting the Fire 7 tablet as you get music, photo storage, videos, books and more, oh and free two-day shipping. Returning to the tablet itself, it’s not going to blow you away (with the possible exception of the weight and how comfortable it is to hold), but it is pretty perfectly suited for simple content consumption, and at $59 the price is certainly right.
