Amazon is done calling its tablets Fire. Starting October 14th, the company is shipping three new Alexa Tablets, and for the first time in 15 years the hardware runs full Android, with the actual Google Play Store, instead of Amazon's stripped-down Fire OS.
There are three models. The Alexa Tablet 8 has an 8.7-inch screen and starts at $229.99, pitched mostly at reading. The Alexa Tablet 11 has an 11-inch screen and starts at $329.99, built more for video. Both sit opposite the iPad Mini and the base iPad on price.
The one Amazon wants people talking about is the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro, starting at $499, with a $549 version carrying an upgraded display. It's 6.5mm thick and weighs 550 grams, which Amazon's Panos Panay, the company's SVP over hardware and Alexa, says makes it a touch thicker and a touch lighter than Apple's 13-inch iPad Pro. Inside is a MediaTek Dimensity 8400, a chip that showed up in high-end phones about a year ago, paired with 8 or 16GB of RAM and 128 or 256GB of storage. Amazon says that combination runs close to three times faster than any tablet it has previously shipped, with roughly nine times the graphics performance.
The screen is the pitch
Panay told The Verge the display was the one component the team refused to compromise on, calling it "the one thing" the whole product had to get right. The 12 Pro's panel measures roughly 12.5 inches with a 2800 x 1840 resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, 500 nits of brightness and a 3:2 aspect ratio that Panay says is built for running two Android apps side by side. The $549 configuration adds what Amazon calls a Nanomatte display, made with Corning, which etches texture directly into the glass to cut glare without the usual loss of contrast or sharpness that comes with matte finishes. Quad Dolby Atmos speakers and Wi-Fi 6E round out the 12 Pro, along with up to 16 hours of video playback.
The bigger shift might be software. Amazon is building a dedicated Kindle mode into the tablets: open the Kindle app and notifications go quiet, blue light drops, and battery life is rated for up to 20 hours in that mode, with three display themes running from warm color to grayscale. A stylus called the Pro Pen lets people mark up and annotate pages directly. Amazon also sells a keyboard case, with Panay saying he wants the 12 Pro treated as a secondary, or even primary, computer.
Alexa Plus sits at the center of all of it, able to answer questions about whatever's on screen, surface recommendations, and point people toward something to buy on Amazon. The Verge noted its own testing of Alexa Plus elsewhere has been mixed, so how well that holds up across a full tablet experience is still an open question nobody outside Amazon has had the chance to answer.
All three tablets go on sale October 14th. Whether Amazon has actually built an iPad rival, instead of just a cheaper screen with Alexa bolted on, is something reviewers will only be able to say once units ship.
GDFiled by The Gadgets Desk
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