Dragon Touch K10 vs Fire HD 10 – do they support Alexa?

Offer Type: With Special Offers

As there are several different varieties of the HD10 Fire you can order, to clarify this review is for the 64GB of storage option with special offers. I am also writing this review from the perspective of being a long-time Fire owner, as I have owned and used nearly every model that has come out over the years (my family thinks I have a problem).

To summarize, for $189 for the 64GB option I think you are getting a heck of a deal on a large-sized tablet in comparison to offerings from other table manufacturers. The price keeps getting lower for increased quality – last year’s model cost $230 and the year before that it was $379 for the 8.9” Fire HDX.

As a heavy user of Fires for several years now, I am impressed with this year’s model not only because of the lower price but several things that annoyed me are much improved, particularly with speed of the processor and the quality of the display on several apps I use as well as video. Initial setup was pretty fast – an easy connection to Wi-Fi, enter your Amazon account username and password to establish this Fire is really yours, followed by an approximate ten minute download and installation of a software update.

As I mentioned above, the speed of the Fire’s processor is noticeably faster than last year’s model: some games I like to play on the Fire are much faster in loading and moving onto the next level without much of a lag – last year’s model would hang and think about it for a while. Looking at the technical specs, the quad 1.8GHz is 20% faster: that makes a huge difference in not only some of the game apps I like but in other things such as switching back and forth between various apps (not only game apps, but apps I use around the house as well as for work).

The screen resolution and quality of video playback is very crisp and very good – I thought last year’s model was a big improvement, but they stepped it up another notch with a screen resolution and pixels per inch 125% greater than last year. I watched portions of the same video with this year’s and last year’s model side-by-side and there was a noticeable difference in the quality.

I’ve been more than impressed with the battery life – maybe my previous versions had different batteries, but the things that normally suck the battery down fast (streaming, some game apps) don’t have as much of a drain on this one. Where I normally have to put it on the charger mid-day, I’ve gone two days doing the things I normally do before feeling the need to charge it. I hope this experience lasts!

It’s also not noticeably heavier than what I was expecting with a 16% increase in weight – I have it in a protective case, and when watching a video, playing a game, or reading a book you don’t really notice a difference.

The two speakers are located on the side of the Fire in two not-noticeable ports. My usual test of this feature is cranking up Van Halen’s “Panama” to maximum volume (I always want to see if it could really play the guitar licks and hear the bass), and I would alternate covering one speaker up over the other: you have true stereo sound, but you’re not able to crank it up as much as you could other models as the sound starts to degrade and you think you are about to blow the speaker. The speakers sound nice at about 50% or less on the indication bar and you do get to hear the bass. One thing to point out is there is not a default equalizer with this Fire: everything sounds the same. To get the most out of the bass and treble, as well as to turn down the mid-range, I highly recommend you downloading and installing one of the many free equalizer apps here from the Amazon app store as it makes a huge difference, especially if you are listening with headphones. Speaking of headphones, the sound sounds great using my cheap box store branded headphones.

It also comes with a port on the opposite side of the speakers to insert a memory card – I added a 256GB memory card to transfer music to it. Sure, you can listen to your music store in the cloud or stream away from your favorite streaming provider, but as I travel a lot it is convenient to have a lot of music stored on it for listening to on the plane.

Reading books is straight forward and turning pages is easy – just tap the side of the screen to go to the next page or back a page, or you can swipe your finger across the screen to do the same.

The Alexa app is incorporated into this version of the Fire tablet – by default, it is “on” and always listening and you will need to manually disable the auto-listen feature and replace it with the “push to talk” option (for lack of a better phrase) if that is your desire. I didn’t realize that when I was in my office and thought I was talking to my Echo Dot – the Fire answered instead. Yes, I know the instructions say if two devices are in the same room the Fire would be the option of last resort to automatically answer, but that was not my experience. Having the Alexa app built-in for voice commands is convenient, as my household has become more dependent on the integrated Alexa gadgets running our household. I do like it built-in as I am able to put in an alarm or timer using my voice, mainly to tell me it is time to put the Fire down and my lunch break at work is over!

One thing I don’t like is everything pushes you to purchase something from the Amazon website- I understand it, but it would be nice to have a competitor’s app store available for the Fire tablet.

If you are new to the tablet world or need a new tablet, or are looking to upgrade from a smaller size I would highly recommend getting this one – not only for the positive technical aspects above but you can get all of this for less than $200. As someone who was disappointed with last year’s version and always looking forward to trying the next one, I am very impressed and will be retiring my beloved 8.9″ model.