Amazon’s Alexa Tablets are powerful, impressive, and designed to take on iPad

Amazon is launching a new lineup of tablets that bear almost no resemblance to any tablet Amazon has ever launched before. They’re not even called Fire, the name Amazon has used for its tablets for the last 15 years. They’re called Alexa Tablets, and they’re designed to do two things: bring Alexa Plus to the center of your whole computing life, and be straight-up excellent tablets.

The most important thing about these new tablets’ software? They run Android. Full, Google Play-supported, all-the-apps Android. There are plenty of preloaded Amazon apps, of course, and some built-in ways to quickly access Prime Video content or shop for basically anything anywhere at any time, but it’s finally offering a proper Android experience. Panos Panay, Amazon’s SVP in charge of all things hardware and Alexa, tells me that “Google Play was a necessity, end of story.”

But Panay picked Android as the second most important thing about the Alexa Tablet. The first, he says, is the hardware. The Alexa Tablet is two and a half years in the making, Panay says, and he directed the team to start completely fresh in their tablet design. “Start from zero, don’t use any components we’ve ever used,” he says he told them. “Just ask, what is it? What is a great piece of hardware and what is it supposed to do?”

There are three devices in the Alexa Tablet lineup, all of which go on sale October 14th. The Tablet 8 has an 8.7-inch screen, starts at $229.99, and seems mostly designed for reading; the Tablet 11 has an 11-inch screen, starts at $329.99, and is more for watching stuff. They’re aimed squarely at the iPad Mini and base iPad, and seem nice enough. But the biggest device in the lineup, the one Panay really wants to tell me about, is the one he thinks really shows off what Amazon is doing here.

It’s called the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro, and it starts at $499. It’s 6.5mm thick and weighs 550 grams — a little thicker and a little lighter than the latest 13-inch iPad Pro — and comes with either 8 or 16 gigs of RAM and either 128 or 256 gigs of storage. It runs a MediaTek Dimensity 8400 processor, a chip you might have found in a high-end phone a year or so ago. All these specs are… fine. Good enough to run an Android tablet, but nothing to write home about.

The feature that really matters, Panay says, is the screen. Panay has this concept of the “one thing,” a single feature on a product that absolutely cannot be compromised on, no matter what. Make tradeoffs where you need to, he tells his team, but not on the one thing. “And the one thing on this product was, let’s go make the perfect screen.”

That screen is a 12.5-inch, 2800 x 1840 display with a refresh rate up to 120Hz and 500 nits of brightness. Its 3:2 aspect ratio, Panay says, is perfect for running two Android apps side by side. And on the most expensive, $549 model Alexa Tablet, the screen comes with what Amazon calls a Nanomatte display. The company partnered with Corning to actually etch a unique texture into the glass itself that is meant to be richer, higher contrast, and less prone to glare than a typical display. The process sounds similar to Apple’s excellent nano-texture finishes, but Amazon seems to believe its method comes with even fewer tradeoffs in contrast and sharpness. I haven’t seen the device in person yet, but The Verge’s Terrence O’Brien has, and it sounds like it has a chance to be as good as advertised.

The screen also adapts to what you’re doing on the tablet. If you launch the Kindle app, it turns off blue lights to make the reading experience warmer and more serene; if you start reading comics, it’ll render them extra glossy. Amazon understands well that tablets are primarily consumption devices — and the company is very happy to optimize for your time in Kindle and Prime Video.

The Alexa Tablet isn’t just for watching and reading, though. Amazon also made a keyboard case and a stylus, and Panay says he hopes people will use it as a secondary or even primary computer. He also hopes you’ll use it to do Alexa things. Amazon has been working on the LLM-powered version of its assistant for the last few years, and believes Alexa Plus can be more than just a smart home assistant. (Our testing suggests… otherwise.) You’ll be able to ask Alexa about anything you see on the screen, and the chatbot will try to offer recommendations, find information, and, of course, try to sell you anything it can find on Amazon.com. On these devices, Alexa Plus appears to be nearly as pervasive as Gemini or Siri on other tablets, and that’s precisely the point.

It has always made sense for Amazon to make tablets. But for so many years, the company that has seemed to be happy to simply make everything as cheap as possible in the hopes you’ll sign up for Prime and buy some stuff in the store. Trying to actually make great tablets seems new, and frankly a little surprising. But if it got the screen right, and made the right tradeoffs elsewhere, Amazon might finally have a proper iPad competitor.