The ~$100 tablet shootout—Amazon Fire 8 HD Plus vs. Walmart Onn 8 Tablet Pro

• The Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus (left) versus the Walmart Onn 8 Tablet Pro. Both cheap tablets with very long names. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Amazon versus Walmart! Two of the world's biggest retailers compete in endless ways, but they're currently going head-to-head in an unexpected market: dirt-cheap Android tablets. And after spending some time recently with the $109.99 Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus and the $99.99 Walmart Onn Tablet 8 Pro, these two cheap tablets look like a microcosm of the companies' retail efforts at large. Walmart is the old-school brick-and-mortar outfit doing its best to keep up with the modern times, while Amazon is the trailblazing technology company and has been doing this tech-focused tablet thing for a long time.

Cheap, but useful

The designs of the two tablets could not be more different. Amazon is on its 10th generation of Android tablets and has the hardware design down to a science. This is only Walmart's second-generation Onn tablet, and it's mostly a cookie-cutter device that has room for improvement. While Amazon wins on hardware, its tablets also come with Fire OS, a fork of Android (Android 9) that doesn't have the Play Store, Google apps, or a huge app selection. Getting the apps I've wanted has been a nonstop sideloading fest, and Fire OS, since it was designed by a retail company, often acts like its primary goal is to get you to spend money with Amazon. Walmart, on the other hand, ships regular-old Google Play Android, which is much less of a hassle to use, has a much bigger app selection, and is actually a newer version: Android 10.

Amazon's Fire tablet is designed primarily for horizontal mode—so it's a media tablet—while Walmart's tablet is designed for vertical mode, which means big phone apps. With auto-rotate, of course, you can use both tablets in either direction, but what you can't change is the location of the hardware components, and you'll see the camera, speakers, power button, and volume buttons arranged differently on each tablet since they favor different orientations. The Walmart Onn 8 Pro is a vertical tablet with two speakers on the bottom edge, so in landscape mode, they aren't really "stereo" speakers since they'll both point out the same side of the device. The Fire tablet, when held in landscape mode, has two speakers on left and right sides of the top edge, so they're roughly in line with your ears. You've got to pick a primary orientation for the speakers, and it's hard to argue against landscape, which is the primary orientation for media and maybe half the games. So that's a point for Amazon.