To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
Amazon has been in the tablet business for years but it has always ploughed its own furrow, preferring to develop its own software and maintain its own Android store. With the new range of Alexa Tablets, however, that’s all about to change, with a new focus on productivity and the long overdue introduction of the Google Play store to its tablets.
The new tablets, which come in the shape of 12in, 11in and 8.7in devices, will be available to pre-order from today, starting from £200 and will ship to customers at the end of October. Here’s what I thought of them from my hands-on session.
Alexa Tablet 12 Pro
The most interesting of the trio is the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro, a tablet seemingly designed to take on the iPad Pro at its own game.
It’s powered by a Mediatek 8400 processor, there’s an optional keyboard and stylus, and you can choose to configure it with a lovely “Nanomatte” screen coating, similar to the TCL Nxtpaper 11 or Huawei MatePad Pro Max. This layer keeps screen reflections at bay and makes reading books on the preloaded Kindle app a rather wondrous experience.
The design is very similar to the iPad Pro, complete with its rounded corners, flat edges and and completely flat rear. The screen measures 12in across the diagonal, has a 3:2 aspect ratio, a refresh rate of 120Hz and a pixel density of 280ppi.
All very impressive, but the key to the success (or not) of the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro is likely to be the redesinged software offering.
Naturally, Amazon is placing the Alexa+ experience right at the heart of this new tablet, with hands-free activation and onscreen popups that appear to give added context to Alexa’s answers.
In keeping with its productivity leanings, you can run apps windowed in a desktop style UI, too, while a “Dynamic Tab” in the top left corner of the desktop surfaces photos, weather, current books and contextual suggestions.
And there’s a new reading experience, too. The tablet automatically activating a special screen mode with reduced blue light and optimised colours when you launch the Kindle app, complete with rather cheesy (and unnecessary) skeuomorphic page-turn animations.
But it’s the new ability to install apps directly from the Play store that’s going to unlock the popularity of this tablet, allowing users to quickly and easily run all the apps they normally use on their Android phones.
Prices are competitive, too, at £500 for the Nanomatte model with 128GB of storage (£450 for the standard screen), with the keyboard costing £140 and the stylus an extra £85.
You can also buy the Nanomatte in a bundle with both accessories for £660 (or £730 if you want 256GB of storage), which is considerably cheaper than either the iPad Pro 13 or the iPad Air 13, which starts at £949 for just the tablet.
Alexa Tablet 11in and 8.7in
The smaller tablets don’t come with the option of the Nanomatte screen, which is a shame because they’d make fantastic reading devices with it. However, they both appear to be well made tablets.
The design is along similar lines to the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro, with iPad-style flat edges and rear, rounded corners and a single camera at the back.
There’s no compatibility with the stylus and no keyboard option either, but the prices are much cheaper. The 11in tablet starts at £290 and is available in graphite, amethyst and matcha colourways, while the 8.7in tablet costs from £200 and comes in graphite, rosette and teal.
The smaller tablets are also available as kids tablets, complete with bundled cases and a year’s worth of Amazon Kids+ subscription included.
