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Performance on New Kindle HD8?

DARK STAR 5 years ago in Browsers Tablets Phones / Amazon Fire updated by Terry (ActionTiles) (Co-Founder) 5 years ago 12

I've set up a new Kindle Fire HD8 with Fully Kiosk (for Fire OS) and Action Tiles. I'm glad I discovered Action Tiles. This is a really great addition to the SmartThings Ecosystem. 

The only issue I have is that changing panels is a little slow. You can see parts of the page "repaginating" as it comes up. I've tried disabling most of the unnecessary features on the tablet already. Any suggestions to improve speed of transitions between panels?

Fire
Waiting for Customer

Hi Dark,

We don't get many performance issues reported on Fire HD8 and Fire HD10; but there are variables that could affect your experience.


  1. How big are your Panels (how many Tiles)?
  2. Do you use Media Tiles? How many? Can you test for a while with no Media Tiles?
  3. Are you running any other processes on the Tablet?

1. Some of the panels have many tiles (24) others only have 4. 

2. I'm currently only using 1 media tile. It's a weather .gif of about 4MB. I've tried removing it temporarily, but it didn't seem to make much difference.

3. This is a hard one to answer. I've tried removing and disabling as much of the standard Amazon applications and services as I can, but it's likely there are some services still left running in the background.

    I'm comparing to ActionTiles performance on an Iphone X. I'm thinking maybe I'm expecting too much from the Kindle HD 8..

    iPhone X = $999. Fire HD 8 = $79.  🤔

    +1

    I am running on two Fire HD 8, not rooted. 10 tiles each, no video. No problems.

    thanks guys. To be fair I did try this on an older iPad and panel transitions are still noticeably snappier than on the kindle. The kindle is not rooted either. It’s a dedicated actiontiles console. Any tricks to disable other unused features?

    To fll in some info on the HD8. I do not like it as it is very laggy when switching pages and opening an app like Spotify. I have 3 cameras on a seperate page and that is only because there was lag when having them on main page. I love Actiontiles but do regret trying the HD8. I don't know many other budget android tablets that are also fast enough but I am all for suggestions.

    Discuss

    I doubt anything has a better performance-to-price ratio than the Fire HD Tablets; i.e., Even if you pay twice as much, you won't get double the performance; and any other brand of tablet around the same "budget price" is likely to be considerably slower and less sharp resolution (though the flexibility may be worthwhile, and, if rooted or custom-ROM, sometimes performance can be boosted).


    It's worth keeping in mind that on-wall (or in-wall) control pads for "home automation systems", generally used to cost thousands of dollars, and are still at least hundreds. I haven't used them and can't speak to their performance, but given that older tablet hardware was less powerful than today's, I'll bet it wasn't a magnitude better.


    We wish there were a better selection of tablets that matched the budget-range of average SmartThings & ActionTiles customers. TaylorTech reviewed one 10" option from Bangood (and lists a few more below the video):

    +1

    It's no doubt in my mind. Nothing comes close to the performance-to price ratio of the Fire HD8. It's a great tablet. And, I just checked the specs; I have a really hard time believing that a quad core A53 would have any trouble rendering a web page in a snap. I'm 90% sure I don't have the Kindle set up correctly or that there is something sucking resources in the background. I will report back if I find anything!

    let me know what you find. I wonder if there is a way to root it and put on a low power room.

    Tempting! But looks like it's a science project of it's own. 

    On a hunch, I pulled up ActionTiles in the Silk Browser and it is noticeably faster. I'm not sure why yet, but the browser built into the Fully Kiosk App definitely seems to be slower in rendering panel transitions. Hopefully it's just something in the Fully settings.

    Fully doesn't have a built-in browser: It uses "Android Webview" (Chromium powered engine that is built into the Android OS ... though the FireOS version might be out of date compared to new "real" Android tablets and phones based on Nougat or Oreo).

    I haven't tested with Silk recently. Another one to try is FireFox (based on Mozilla).