Fire HD 8 Tablet (8″ HD Display, 16 GB) – Black

I really wanted to like this tablet. I have many friends who have the Kindle Fire and they love it. I had high hopes but so far I’m not loving it. I stayed at a friend’s house a month before the newest edition came out. She has 3 Fires, all different sizes. I played on hers and liked them. So much that I was sold on buying one. I decided to get the newest one since it was due out in 3 weeks. The problem I’m having is it’s incredibly slow. It takes almost a minute and a half to open the screen from the lock. When it finally does it takes another 45 seconds to a minute to load the apps. That may not sound like a long time but for a tablet it’s an eternity. A brand new one at that. I tried to open Amazon store to review this Fire and it sat on a white screen for 3 minutes and 17 seconds. Yes, I timed it. Once the Amazon logo showed up it was another minute before the rest of the page loaded. Then I clicked on the menu to pull up my orders and it remained unresponsive. I put it down and picked up my phone to leave this review. As I type this it still has not accepted my command and is frozen. I don’t even have a lot loaded. Most apps on it are the ones that come hard coded on it. I’ve been trying to give it time to see if it will get better but I’m tired of fussing with it. There are times it works just fine but most of the time it’s very, very slow. IF I decide to get another one, I’m going one generation down. This one is not great. I’m beginning to think I may have gotten a dud but then I read other reviews and it seems this generation is struggling. Very sad because I wanted to like it. It’s back to Samsung for me.

UPDATE: First I want to say Amazon’s customer service is absolutely top notch! I received a phone call from them about 10 minutes after leaving this review. They did not try to “sell” me on keeping it nor did they patronize me and ask me to trouble shoot. I did inform them I had done all the basics of rebooting, factory reset, etc. There had apparently been an update that got stuck and didn’t fully complete. I completed it with his help and he asked me to give it a couple days. I did. Again, I had hoped that was going to fix the problem. Sadly, it didn’t. I received a follow up call from them a few days later and I told them I was still having the slowness problem. They graciously offered for me to return it and they would refund me. Overall, though I was sad to have to return the Fire, Amazon made the experience better with jumping into action.