Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

There's a lot to like about the new Fire HD 8 tablet, but there are some serious irritations too. The Pros: it's lightweight, it's got GREAT battery life. You can organize the books in your collection by simply dragging them around, so you can (for example) keep a series of books in their proper reading order no matter what order you bought them. Very nice, that. The Cons: Mostly...the operating system. The version that's on the Fire 8 (2017 model, purchased July 2017), has some MASSIVE irritations. First, when you hold it in landscape mode, and try to read a book, the text flows the ENTIRE WIDTH of the screen. Instead of breaking the text into two side-by-side pages, as the older Fire 8.9 table does, this new tablet has lines that are FAR too long for easy reading. It's too easy for the eye to skip up or down a line when they're this long. BAD. I've attached two photos, one showing a page on the 8.9" fire, and the other showing the same page on the new Fire HD 8" (2017) tablet. I spent nearly an hour on the phone with a customer support person trying to find some setting or some other way to get my side-by-side page display back. After an extraordinarily frustrating conversation with someone who barely understood English and who told me she was "unable to transfer me back to US for real support" the final answer I got was that "The Kindle cannot do that." Right. The OLD Kindle Fire tablets did that just fine. The NEW Kindle Fire tablets apparently DO NOT. So that means I'm stuck reading in Portrait mode even though my preference is strongly for landscape mode with side-by-side pages. A second issue is that files are now divided into Books, Games, Apps, etc. (no label for Docs you upload to your Kindle, but an icon is on the home page--you may have to scrounge around for it). So if you go into Books, you have to then choose Library to see YOUR books. Then you have to go to the menu and select Collections to see them organized in your collections. Okay. Cool. BUT...if you go back to home page and then re-select Books, you have to do that whole process AGAIN to see them in Collections. The old Fire 8.9 operating system remembers whether you were looking at the books by Collection or not, and takes you back to where you were. This is needlessly awkward and frustrating. In fact, ALL the options on the main page (i.e., Games, Apps, Books, etc.) forget where you were and take you to their default location. That's user-aggravating in a massive way. The whole user interface thing is just an issue with the Fire HD 8. It's not nearly as simple to use and it keeps popping you back into its default display instead of remembering where you were and what you wanted. The older Fire HD 8.9 system didn't do that. It had much better recall for what you were doing. Oh, yeah, and Alexis? That voice function that's supposed to help you with problems? Well...as long as you want to BUY something, it kind of works. Though it probably won't take you to the product you really want. If you want HELP with something...forget it. It'll only take you to an Amazon sales page. Useless. Totally useless. And..the ads are MASSIVELY intrusive. I strongly , strongly, strongly recommend that you use the Manage Your Devices menu on the Amazon website and pay the $15 to get rid of those crappy ads. They're horrible. That was almost the first thing I did. I'd frankly give the hardware an "A" and the software a "C-minus" for this version. And I'd give their Customer Support folks a "D-minus".