The Alexa Tablet 12 Pro Is Almost the Android Tablet We Needed

We need to talk about this screen. It's the first thing you notice and perhaps the only thing that matters about the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro. It's a 12-inch panel with a 2800 by 1840 resolution and new technology Amazon calls "Nanomatte," designed to reduce glare and enhance the feeling that you can […]

We need to talk about this page. That's the first thing you'll notice, and perhaps the only thing that matters, about the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro. It's a 12-inch panel with a resolution of 2800 x 1840 with a new technology that Amazon calls "Nanomatte" that's meant to reduce glare and increase the feeling that you can reach and touch what you see on the screen. When Amazon set out to build the best tablet the company has ever released, it started with this screen.

The $549.99 device I tested is one of four new models in Alexa's tablet lineup, which ranges from the $229.99 8-inch model to the $679.99 12 Pro with that Nanomatte finish and some extra RAM you don't really need. It's the same for all of these devices: they're well-built, mid-range tablets that can access a whole bunch of Android apps through the Play Store, and they come with a bunch of Amazon bloatware, like it or not. I haven't tested those other devices, but I'm glad they exist - cheap, good Android tablets are hard to come by.

[Product: Amazon Alexa Tablet 12 Pro |

But nanomet. Nanomet! The etching on the screen, which Amazon says it worked with Corning at the sub-pixel level to reduce glare without creating the iridescent rainbow effect you can get with other matte screens, does its job perfectly. When I use my iPad outdoors, I can often see what's behind me, like I'm staring into a mirror. 12 Pro reflects only a small glint of light, and does so without losing clarity. The viewing angles are also incredible. I'd like the screen to be a little brighter, but since the main reason for the brightness reduction is to combat glare, it's not really a problem.

The screen is not full. The anti-glare texture gives the Alexa tablet a bit of a glow, especially when you're looking at bright text on a black background. And iPad blacks are blacker still. When watching a movie, the top and bottom letterboxes still glow slightly on the Alexa tablet's LCD, and are perfectly flat on the iPad's OLED panel. Some of these things you can fix: the 12 Pro has special modes that automatically change tone and color to make reading more enjoyable, and you can even control the overall picture via a few presets like those you'd find on your TV. My review unit was on with the 'Enhanced' mode on, which made all colors a bit colorful. I changed it to "natural" and immediately liked the picture better.

[Image: This is as good a reading tablet as you'll find anywhere.

I'm not sure if this screen counts as a revolution in screen technology, but then again, the first second I turned it on, I reflexively said, "Oh," and all it showed was the Amazon logo. I love this display for everything. The 120Hz refresh rate looks great when running Star Wars: GalacticRacer, and the 3:2 aspect ratio is perfect for web browsing and coworking. The quieter display modes make reading even more enjoyable than on your average giant screen, though it's okay that they only work in the Kindle app. After a few days of using the tablet indoors and outdoors, I prefer the 12 Pro's display to any iPad I've tried. (Unfortunately, I don't have an iPad Pro with nano-textured glass to compare it to, but it's a $2,200 tablet. I doubt anyone would argue between the two.)

All that display technology in a $549.99 device would require a trade-in basically anywhere else, and Amazon makes a lot of them. The MediaTek Dimensity 8400 processor is somewhere between a high-end Android flagship phone from last year and a flagship phone from two years ago, and can be used by almost any current iPad. In a graphics-heavy benchmark, the current 13-inch iPad Pro scored about nine times better.

I would like more horsepower here, but in my everyday use there is plenty of power in this tablet. In a few days of gaming, running errands, and watching a lot of NFL RedZone, the only slowness I've detected has been small things in the Android experience. The app changer sometimes stutters when loading. I think I'm a little worried about how this tablet will age, given that it doesn't quite share the iPad's processing power offering, but so far so good.

Come to think of it, "good" pretty much describes the 12 Pro's hardware. The speaker drivers are a bit thin and muddy, but loud and clear enough. Cameras wash out some colors, but work for video calls. The $149.99 keyboard is good for typing, but it's a little hard to take apart and manipulate. The $89.99 stylus is smooth and responsive, but many Android apps don't support the stylus. The battery lasted me about eight hours of screen-on time, which is a little less than I'd like and less than Amazon advertises. Nothing here is a deal breaker, just very good.

[Image: The Play Store will immediately make this improvement on Fire tablets.

On the other hand, software is all extreme. The great news: Alexa's tablets run full Android, not the weird OS that Amazon's Fire tablets have been using for the past 15 years. That means you get all the apps in the Play Store, a much-improved user interface, and access to things like the Google Gemini Assistant. By itself, this change makes these tablets Amazon's most functional tablets.

If you're going to say you're "obsessed with customers," you can't borrow the top left corner of my home page and then use that space to display a vague ad for "Cooking with Premium Ingredients" that also launches an Alexa chat window in the bottom right corner of my home page.

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

[Illustration: I don't need Alexa front and center on my tablet.

If Alexa Plus were actually useful, I'd be less bothered by the overabundance of Alexa on this tablet, which it mostly isn't. If you're looking to buy whatever's on your screen, Alexa is your bot: You can invoke the assistant in any app, and it'll almost always assume your intent is to buy 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, gets lost in back-and-forth conversations, and still doesn't access enough of my apps and data to be useful. You can go to Gemini in your device settings and you should.

Once you ditch the Amazon tablet, you'll have a very useful Android device. And this is where the evaluation of the Alexa tablet becomes difficult. Given the sorry state of large-screen Android apps, I wouldn't recommend using it as a primary computer. (Between that and the ongoing failure of the Googlebook, I really hope Google learns a lesson about encouraging developers to take care of large screens and keyboards.) But between the Kindle-specific display mode, all the streaming and reading apps in the Play Store, and that fantastic screen, this is instantly one of the best tablets tablets can buy.

In fact, you're probably debating whether to buy an Alexa tablet or an iPad. (Apologies to Samsung Galaxy Tab buyers, but this one is a better buy for just about everyone.) For the same $550 you'd drop for the 12 Pro, you can get a base iPad with 256GB of storage. I would 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 past 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 find myself reaching for the Amazon device. It is really beautiful to see