Goes like the blazes: Amazon Fire HDX 8.9 late 2014 edition

Dolby Atmos enabled fondleslab, anyone?

A taste of Sangria

The big technical improvement with the new HDX is the chipset. The 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800 and Adreno 330 components buried inside the previous model have made way for a 2.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm 8084 CPU based Snapdragon 805 SoC, an Adreno 420 graphics wrangler and 2GB of RAM.

Geekbench 3 results – click for a larger image

Those brand new bits and pieces make for an 11 per cent performance improvement in the multi-core test according to the Geekbench 3 benchmark app, which I ran on both the new and not-so-new HDX 8.9. Nigel Tufnel would surely approve.

The previous HDX was no slouch but when it comes to graphics performance the new machine has the old well beaten. The frame rates in Futuremark’s 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited tests were noticeably smoother. In fact, some of the tests ran at nearly twice the frame rate of the older model.

The new chipset is more efficient too. The battery is the same size as in the previous model (though Amazon doesn't say what the capacity is) but I squeezed nearly 14 hours out of it while looping a 1080p MP4 video with the screen brightness at 75 per cent and the Wi-Fi radio on. The old HDX coughed and died after 12 hours subjected to the same test.

At 375g, you can't hold the Fire HDX 8.9 comfortably in one hand for too long

The new HDX runs Fire OS 4, which has the rather odd codename Sangria. It’s a fork of Android 4.4.3 rather than of 4.2.2, which is what you got in the previous gen HDX and the Fire Phone. There’s nothing revolutionary to be seen. Changes to the UI are really just a wash and brush-up; a more logical arrangement of icons here, a larger graphic here. That’s no big deal though as the Fire OS user interface has always been pretty simple to use and largely idiot proof.

There are however a few handy new additions. The new keyboard is a big improvement – assuming you don’t fancy a third-party affair – while Household Profiles is a new feature to create multiple users.

Household Profiles are a handy way of enabling sharing without sharing too much

It allows up to two adults and four children to have their own content carousel, app collections and set of preferences. A new Docs tab on the homescreen now lets you create and edit documents using the preinstalled copy of the WPS Office app, while VPN support makes the HDX 8.9 more suitable for office use.