Sports · Asia Post
For years, Amazon’s Fire tablets have been the cheap and cheerful tablet you bought for your kids or your nan. With no support for Google Play, sluggish performance and ads jammed into the interface, most people just picked up an iPad instead. Now, Amazon has launched what might be the most premium tablet range the company’s ever made.
The tech giant has unveiled three new so-called Alexa tablets that run on Android 16, with a sleek design, a more powerful processor and, finally, full access to the Google Play Store. And at the heart of it – if you didn’t guess by the name – is Amazon's souped-up AI assistant Alexa+, which has been seared into all three tablets, letting you ask questions about whatever's on your screen, summarise webpages and help you complete tasks. The new Alexa Tablet 8, Alexa Tablet 11 and Alexa Tablet 12 Pro launch later this month, and I got an early look.
Read more: Best tablets, reviewed Amazon Alexa tablet 12 pro: £499.99, Amazon.co.uk The nanomatte display almost looks like paper (Alex Lee/The Independent) The Alexa tablet 12 pro is a far cry from the plasticky Fire tablets of old. Looking more iPad-like than ever before, the new Alexa Tablet 12 Pro features an aluminium design, a large 12in display with a 120Hz refresh rate and the fastest processor Amazon’s ever put into an Amazon tablet – more than superseding the Amazon Fire Max 11. It’s almost built like a Kindle-tablet hybrid.
Super slim at just 6.5mm, it comes with what Amazon calls a nanomatte display. Developed with Corning, it almost looks like paper. What’s nice about matte displays is that they don’t reflect every single light source back at you, so you can happily enjoy watching Strictly without the reflection of your face getting in the way.
Amazon says the glass has been etched at a microscopic level to reduce glare without dulling the colours. I saw it in person ahead of the launch, and I was really quite impressed. Now, Amazon's not the first to release a tablet with a matte display.
Apple's been offering its own nano-texture glass on the iPad Pro for a while now, but it's only available on the most expensive configurations, so you’d have to splash out almost £2,000 to get a nano-texture iPad, compared to £500 for the Amazon Alexa Pro tablet. From my brief hands-on, the screen looked crisp and vibrant, which is pretty difficult to achieve with a matte display, especially when it comes to colour and contrast, though I wasn’t able to compare it side-by-side with Apple’s nano-texture iPads. Amazon reckons its screen retains 82 per cent of contrast in bright conditions.
There's a standard glossy version available, too. What makes it feel even more Kindle-like is the reading experience. When you open a book in the Kindle app, the tablet morphs into a distraction-free ereader.
It automatically silences notifications and reduces blue light, giving you the option of three different reading modes – standard, soft colour and ink paper. With the latter, you can even change the colour of the paper. Amazon says the reading experience lasts up to 20 hours on a single charge, so you won’t need to worry about charging up when you’re getting to the good bit.
I really liked the smooth transition when swiping through pages as well. Read more: Amazon’s just launched three new Kindles There are three paper modes in the Kindle app (Alex Lee/The Independent) Similar to the Kindle Scribe, you can scrawl notes through your books and highlight passages with an optional pro pen, which costs £79.99. It magnetically snaps on to the side of the tablet, and also charges this way.
Amazon says it has 4,096 pressure levels and tilt detection. It's not just a glorified Kindle Scribe though. The Amazon Alexa tablet 12 pro runs on MediaTek's Dimensity 8400 processor, which has an eight-core CPU, a seven-core GPU and up to 16GB of RAM.
That’s significantly more powerful than the processor found on the Fire Max 11. The storage sizes are a little disappointing, however – it only comes with either 128GB or 256GB of storage, which isn’t much if you’re storing lots of files, though again much more internal storage than on the Fire Max 11. Still, it’s an enormous step up.
Amazon even demonstrated the graphically demanding action RPG Where Winds Meet on the device, something that could never in a million years be achieved on a Fire tablet. Perhaps the biggest upgrade is the software. Amazon has finally done away with the heavily modified Fire OS in favour of Android 16, giving you full and unfettered access to the Google Play Store.
That means you can download the same apps on a Samsung or Google tablet, without having to find, ahem, some suspect workarounds. Alexa+ only pops up when you need it (Alex Lee/The Independent) You can multitask to your heart’s content, open apps in different windows, move them around and even switch between workspaces. There's even a separate magnetic keyboard for £129.99, which has a built-in trackpad and Alexa key, essentially turning the tablet into a hybrid laptop with cursor controls.
Amazon showed how you could edit a video in CapCut, and then use photos and clips from Amazon Photos in a different window. Amazon Alexa+ is obviously a core tenet of the new Amazon Alexa tablet experience, with the tech giant embedding it into the entire device. In the top-left corner is something called the Dynamic Tab, which is a constantly changing panel powered by Alexa+.
It surfaces things it thinks you might be interested in, from books you're reading to films you've started watching to restaurant recommendations and cinema tickets. There's also a new For You screen that pools all your Kindle books, Audible audiobooks and more into one place, so you don’t need to open up apps to restart what you were doing. A pen and full-size keyboard are sold separately (Alex Lee/The Independent) Alexa+ itself lives in the corner of the screen.
It pops up in a floating window whenever summoned. Amazon showed off how it could understand a picture of chocolate-covered strawberries on Pinterest, suggest a recipe and save it so you could pull it up later on an Echo Show. Alexa+ can also read webpages when you’re using the Amazon Silk browser, then use that information to contextualise what it already knows about you.
In one demo, the user opened up a webpage listing London's parks, then asked Alexa which would be best for a run. It recommended St James's Park based on the user's hotel location, something it knew because of information in the calendar and previous conversations about 5K training goals. You can even turn your Alexa tablet pro into a portable Amazon Echo Show, something Amazon calls the Alexa Immersive View.
What this does is essentially turn the tablet into a smart home hub, with your calendar, reminders, tasks and smart home devices on screen at once. The nanomatte version of the Alexa tablet 12 pro starts at £499.99, and the standard glossy version starts at £449.99. But not forgetting its cheap and cheerful roots, Amazon also unveiled two more affordable Alexa tablets.
The Alexa tablet 11 (£289.99, Amazon.co.uk ) boasts an 11in display, the same eight-core processor, 8GB of RAM, Dolby Atmos speakers and up to 15 hours of battery life. While it’s still capable of CPU-intensive tasks thanks to that processor, there’s no pen or keyboard support. Amazon also launched two more affordable Alexa tablets (Alex Lee/The Independent) Lastly, there’s the Alexa tablet 8 (£199.99, Amazon.co.uk ), which is a smaller, more portable version of the 11in tablet.
It has an 8.7in display and weighs just 329g. Both come with the same Alexa+ smarts and access to Google Play as the pricier pro device, so you get all the same smarts, plus that glorious aluminium construction. And not to forget the kids – arguably the Fire tablet’s core audience – you can also get the Alexa tablet 8 and Alexa tablet 11 with chunky protective cases, similar to the Amazon Fire Kids tablets.
They’re built to withstand a drop down the stairs, tumbles and tantrums. The kids’ versions come with a year's subscription to Amazon Kids+. The service provides hundreds of kid-friendly games, books, videos and apps without any in-app purchases.
Parents can control the Google Play apps their little ones request to download, set screentime limits and see what they get up to. All three tablets launch on 19 October and are available to pre-order now. Pre-order Amazon Alexa tablet 12 pro now For more, we’ve reviewed the best Amazon Kindle devices in 2026
Source: The Independent
