Amazon just announced a welcomed refresh of their 8-Inch HD tablet, and Fire HD 8 preorders are already live at the same price point as the last gen model. It ships with a handful of modest upgrades on October 4th.
The new Fire HD 8's core guts remain mostly the same. Its processor, screen, and on board memory are unchanged, but the front facing camera gets a solid bump from 0.3MP to 2MP. Amazon also doubled the max allowed MicroSD card capacity, allowing for up to 400GB of additional storage space. This is due to the updated version of FireOS based on Android 7.1 instead of 5.1 on which last model runs.
If you own the previous generation Fire HD 8, it’s probably not worth replacing unless you regularly exceed 200GB of MicroSD storage space or want a better selfie / video chat camera. That said, the smattering of upgrades to the new Fire HD 8 are quite nice. With the price remaining just $80, the new Fire HD 8 remains one of the hottest budget tablets you can buy.