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 are a few samples to drive home my point. If you have any phone made in roughly the last decade it is going to capture better photos and videos than the Fire 7, so unless you are just jumping on a quick video chat with the front-facing camera or your dog has started spontaneously speaking to you and the Fire 7 is the only device in reach then please use almost anything else. What’s that? Did you want to hear more about them? *Sigh* The fact that they exist at all is roughly the best thing I can say about the cameras on the Amazon Fire 7. Yes, it has a 2MP front-facing camera and a 2MP rear-facing camera. (Image credit: Laptop Mag/Sean Riley) Amazon Fire 7 (2022) cameras You can even do some light gaming, but think Subway Surfers and banish any recollection of Genshin Impact from your brain. 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. 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. 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. It’s enough to run Fire OS pretty smoothly when scrolling through your apps, videos or books, but you can absolutely bog it down by loading up too many tabs in the Silk browser or simply trying to jump rapidly between apps. None of that sounds particularly encouraging when it comes to performance, although that’s 30% faster and double the RAM of the 2019 model. The Amazon Fire 7 features an unnamed quad-core 2.0 GHz processor with 2GB of RAM. (Image credit: Laptop Mag/Sean Riley) Amazon Fire 7 (2022) performance

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. 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. 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. The speaker works for listening to spoken word content like Audible or podcasts or for Alexa to respond to you. Volume isn’t bad, but at the edges of my 12 x 18-foot listening space, it would start to sound a bit faint. The lone speaker on the side of the Fire 7 made the strumming of the guitar and the wistful tune sound like it was being played into a tin can. It was a reminder of how spoiled I am by the stereo speakers in the best smartphones and tablets. I listened to “Hotel California (2013 Remaster)” by The Eagles, because that was one of the “Hot Songs” that Amazon Music saw fit to put in front of me.

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 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. (Image credit: Laptop Mag/Sean Riley) Amazon Fire 7 (2022) audio 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. 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. 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 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. Outside of the glossy Amazon logo on the back, the Fire 7 tablet is the quintessential black plastic slab tablet with thick bezels that at this point I have to believe are there to maintain the form factor rather than hit a price. If you were to look up “utilitarian tablet design” in the dictionary you wouldn’t find an entry for it, because why would that be in there? But if we are to imagine that there would be an entry the Fire 7 is clearly the front-runner to be pictured there.

(Image credit: Laptop Mag/Sean Riley) Amazon Fire 7 (2022) design

Fire 7 5th generation specs