The Amazon Fire HD 6 ($99, 8GB) is the first under-$100 tablet we feel comfortable recommending, but not without reservations. If you're looking for a kid's tablet or something to browse Amazon content on, it's a good deal. But its very limited storage and restricted OS prevent it from becoming more.

I don't know if you've ever heard of Chromo, Dragon Touch, Neutab, or Prontotec,  but they all come up on the first page of an Amazon.com search for tablets. They're companies making inexpensive, poorly designed, often painful-to-use Android tablets that cost about $50, and we don't recommend any of them.

Amazon said it's been selling a lot of these inexpensive tablets, and getting a lot of them back, so the company decided to make one that people wouldn't want to return. That's a little disingenuous, because like all prior Kindle Fires, the Fire HD 6 is a very different experience than a generic Android tablet. It's much more curated, but much less open; much easier to use and more child-friendly, but better for browsing Amazon's content than your own.

The Amazon Fire HD 6 and HD 7 (at right in the photo below, along with the new Fire HDX) are the same tablet in two sizes. We'll cover most of the details here in this HD 6 review, because it's the more important tablet (coming in at that sub-$100 price point) and the one we more highly recommend.

The $99 base model of the HD 6 has 5.07GB of free storage and comes with ads on the lock screen. You can add another 8GB of storage for $20 and get rid of the ads for $15, but the tricked-out version now costs $134, which gets really close to the price of more powerful tablets like the Asus Memo Pad 7 and the LG G Pad 7.0. So while we usually suggest amping up the memory, we're going to look at the sub-$100 model here.

Physical Features and Battery Life

The Fire HD 6 is a chunky, solid tablet at 6.7 by 4.1 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and a surprisingly heavy 10.1 ounces. It comes in black, blue, pink, white, or yellow, and has an angled back with just enough design to make it not look generic. The matte plastic back doesn't quite wrap around, but there's a sturdy-looking plastic bumper around the edge.

The 252ppi, 1,280-by-800 screen is brighter and more even than you'd expect in a sub-$100 tablet, and thanks to the small screen size, it looks pretty tight. There's a large black bezel around the screen, but that's fine at this price point. The size makes the HD 6 perfect as a color ebook reader, especially for kids' books and comics; it's easy to hold in one hand, although it's pretty heavy.

There's Wi-Fi, but only at 2.4GHz. Even on the 2.4GHz band, Wi-Fi performance falls well behind cutting-edge devices like the Apple iPad Air and iPhone 6, but of course, that's not what we're really competing with. Tested against our Meraki MR16 router connected to a fast corporate network, we managed to pull at least 8Mbps down at distances up to 50 feet. That's important, because 8Mbps is what Netflix recommends for 1080p, HD streaming. So while Wi-Fi speeds won't lead here, they'll get the job done.

We got 5 hours, 47 minutes of video playback time at maximum brightness with the Fire HD 6. While that's decent, it fell short of the aforementioned Asus tablet's 6 hours, 49 minutes and the LG tablet's 8 hours and 2 minutes.

OS, Processor, and Apps

The HD 6 uses a MediaTek MT8135 processor, a quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 design with two cores running at 1.2GHz and two at 1.5GHz. It scored well for a low-cost tablet on the Geekbench benchmarks in our tests, coming out between the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 and Dell Venue 8. On the GFXBench graphics benchmarks, it also scored better than the Galaxy Tab 4, but disturbingly kept running out of memory; both lack of operational RAM and lack of storage came up over and over again in my testing.

Browser benchmarks were enhanced by Amazon's Silk browser, which uses tricks like server-side pre-caching to deliver performance above the norm for an inexpensive tablet. That said, it still feels laggy, with delays when you're scrolling down pages. Par for the course at this price point.

The tablet runs Amazon's Fire OS 4.1 Sangria, which is based on Android 4.4.2. This version brings multiple profiles for different family members, but keeps the simple carousel-based interface. One critical difference between Amazon's tablet OS and other Android tablets is the focus on the cloud, something that becomes very important with an 8GB tablet. By default, the tablet doesn't differentiate between apps and content stored in Amazon's cloud and material physically on your device. (There's a switch to see device-only content.) If you always use your tablet on a Wi-Fi network, that can be liberating; if you're frequently disconnected, that can be confusing.

As always, Amazon's OS puts content first: books, music, videos, and magazines get pride of place in a menu across the top of the screen. Tap on one of those categories, and you'll see the content you can download or stream from Amazon; drill down to find non-Amazon content. Apps come, of course, from Amazon's app store.

If you can't find an Android app in Amazon's store, you can port it over using a PC and sites like GoodEReader.com. That way, I installed Marvel Unlimited on the tablet and found it a much better experience than Amazon's own sluggish and laggy ComiXology app. If you're looking for a great, affordable little comics reader, the Fire HD 6 with Marvel Unlimited or the PerfectViewer CBR reader app might just be the ticket. 

I'm disappointed to see that the HD 6 lacks Mayday, Amazon's customer-service app. During my review, I wanted to use Mayday three times, mostly to find things buried in the settings. The basic on-device help didn't help, and I had to do Web searches for the answers.