Amazon Alexa Tablet 12 Pro review: almost the Android tablet we needed

We have to talk about this screen. It’s the first thing you notice, and maybe the only thing that matters, about the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro. It’s a 12-inch, 2800 x 1840 panel with a new technology Amazon calls “Nanomatte” that is meant to decrease glare and increase the feeling that you can reach out and touch the things you see onscreen. When Amazon set out to build the best tablet the company has ever shipped, it started with this screen.

The $549.99 device I’ve been testing is one of four new models in the Alexa Tablet lineup, which ranges from a $229.99 8-inch model up to a $679.99 12 Pro with this Nanomatte coating and some extra RAM you don’t really need. The pitch for all those devices is the same: They’re well-made, midrange tablets that can access the full universe of Android apps through the Play Store and come with a whole bunch of Amazon bloatware whether you want it or not. I haven’t tested those other devices, but I’m glad they exist — cheap, good Android tablets are too hard to come by.

But the Nanomatte. The Nanomatte! The etching on the display, which Amazon says it partnered with Corning to do at a sub-pixel level to reduce glare without causing the slight rainbow-shimmering effect you can get on other matte screens, absolutely does its job. When I use my iPad outdoors, I can often see what’s behind me like I’m staring into a mirror; the 12 Pro reflects only a small sheen of light, and does it without losing any sharpness. The viewing angles are incredible, too. I’d like the display to be a little brighter, but since the main reason to crank the brightness is to fight glare, it hasn’t really been a problem.

The screen is not perfect. The anti-glare texture gives the Alexa Tablet a bit of shimmer, especially when you’re looking at light text on a black background. And the iPad’s blacks are still blacker; watching a movie, the letterboxes above and below are still slightly lit on the Alexa Tablet’s LCD, and they’re just flat-out off on the iPad’s OLED panel. Some of this you can fix: The 12 Pro has specific modes that automatically tweak tone and color to make reading more pleasant, and you can even control the overall picture through a few presets like the ones you’d find on your TV. My review unit came with “Boosted” mode turned on, which made every color just a smidge too colorful. I turned it to “Natural” and immediately liked the picture better.

I’m not sure this screen counts as some revolution in display technology, but then again, I did reflexively say “whoa” the first second I turned it on, and all that was showing was the Amazon logo. I like this display for everything. The 120Hz refresh rate looks great when running Star Wars: Galactic Racer, and the 3:2 aspect ratio feels right for web browsing and side-by-side work. The more muted display modes even make reading more pleasant than your average giant screen, though it’s lame that they only work in the Kindle app. After a few days of using the tablet indoors and out, I prefer the 12 Pro’s screen to any iPad I’ve tried. (Unfortunately, I don’t have an iPad Pro with the nano-texture glass to compare it to, but that’s a $2,200 tablet. I doubt anyone’s debating between the two.)

All that display tech in a $549.99 device requires tradeoffs basically everywhere else, and Amazon makes lots of them. The MediaTek Dimensity 8400 processor benchmarks somewhere between a flagship high-end Android phone from last year and a flagship phone from two years ago, and gets absolutely lapped by practically every current iPad. In one graphics-heavy benchmark, the current 13-inch iPad Pro scored about nine times higher.

I’d like more horsepower here, but in my day-to-day use there’s plenty of power in this tablet. In several days of playing games, doing work, and watching a lot of NFL RedZone, the only slowness I’ve detected has been little niggling things in the Android experience. The app switcher sometimes stutters when it loads. I suppose I worry a little about how this tablet will age, given that it doesn’t share the iPad’s preposterous oversupply of processing power, but for now it’s fine.

Come to think of it, “it’s fine” explains most of the 12 Pro’s hardware. The four speakers are a little thin and muddy, but loud and clear enough. The cameras wash out some colors, but they work for video calls. The $149.99 keyboard case is nice to type on, but a little awkward to detach and manipulate. The $89.99 pen is smooth and responsive, but not many Android apps support a stylus. The battery lasts me about eight hours of screen time, which is a little less than I’d like and less than Amazon advertises. Nothing here is a deal-breaker, it’s just a lot of fine.

The software, on the other hand, is all extremes. The great news: The Alexa Tablets run full Android, not the weird off-brand operating system Amazon’s Fire tablets have used for the last 15 years. That means you get all the apps in the Play Store, a vastly improved interface, and access to things like Google’s Gemini assistant. All by itself, that change makes these the most functional Amazon tablets ever.

Unfortunately, Amazon did to Android exactly what you’d fear — and maybe expect. It Amazon-ed the crap out of things. I’m fine with the slide-over panel to the left of the homescreen filled with content recommendations; the overlap of Alexa Tablet owners and Prime subscribers / Kindle readers is probably pretty high, and at least that screen isn’t staring you in the face every time you unlock your tablet. I can even live with Amazon preloading its own browser, photos, and music apps, none of which are better than their competition. But it is frankly outrageous that Amazon thinks it can get away with adding two separate, non-removable homescreen widgets that serve no purpose other than advertising Amazon’s products.

If you’re going to say you “obsess over customers,” you don’t get to borrow the top left corner of my homescreen and then use that space to show me an ad vaguely offering to “Cook with premium ingredients” that launches an also unhideable Alexa chat window in the bottom right corner of my homescreen.

Luckily, this is Android, and installing a new launcher takes 30 seconds. If you buy an Alexa Tablet, I recommend doing so immediately.

I would be less annoyed by Alexa’s overbearing presence on this tablet if Alexa Plus were actually useful, which it mostly is not. If you’re looking to buy whatever’s on your screen, Alexa’s your bot: You can invoke the assistant in any app, and it’ll almost always assume your goal is to shop for whatever you’re currently looking at. If you want, well, anything else, you’re probably out of luck. Almost a year after its launch, Alexa Plus is not a very good assistant. It’s slow, it gets lost in back-and-forth conversations, and it still doesn’t have enough access to my apps and data to be useful. You can switch to Gemini in the device’s settings, and you should.

Once you de-Amazon the tablet, you’re left with a pretty useful Android device. And this is where the Alexa Tablet gets tricky to evaluate. I wouldn’t recommend using it as a primary computer, given the still sorry state of large-screen Android apps. (Between this and the ongoing Googlebook fiasco, I really hope Google is learning a lesson about incentivizing developers to care about big screens and keyboards.) But between the Kindle-specific display mode, all the streaming and reading apps in the Play Store, and this terrific screen, this is immediately one of the best tablets-for-tablet-things you can buy.

Realistically, you’re probably debating whether to buy the Alexa Tablet or an iPad. (Apologies to the Samsung Galaxy Tab shoppers out there, but this one’s a way better buy for almost everybody.) For the same $550 you’ll drop on the 12 Pro, you can get a base-model iPad with 256GB of storage. I’d probably tell you to buy the iPad; it has much better tablet software and much better big-screen apps, and Apple has a much better track record in tablets.

And yet for the last few days, I’ve had an iPad and an Alexa Tablet sitting on my desk, and every time I want to watch or read something I’ve found myself gravitating to Amazon’s device. It is really nice to look at.