Anyone who mostly reads and watches on a tablet now has an Amazon option worth weighing against an iPad, provided they are willing to strip some of Amazon out of it first. The Alexa Tablet 12 Pro began shipping in the United States, Mexico and Canada on October 14, according to Amazon’s launch announcement, and The Verge’s review published the same day gave it a Verge Score of 6. The reviewer praised the screen and the move to full Android, and faulted the advertising, the assistant and the battery.
Pricing needs a careful read. Amazon lists the 12 Pro at $499.99 with 8GB of memory and 128GB of storage, and $549.99 for the Nanomatte display version. The review was written about the $549.99 Nanomatte unit. Reviewer David Pierce says it is one of four models in the lineup, topping out at $679.99 with extra memory, and that he has not tested the others. Gizmodo’s hands-on describes the line as a marked shift for Amazon, with three display sizes, 8 inches, 11 inches and the 12-inch Pro, on sale from October 14.
Everything else is a trade. In Pierce’s comparison the MediaTek Dimensity 8400 processor sits between a flagship Android phone from last year and one from two years ago, and in one graphics-heavy test a 13-inch iPad Pro scored about nine times higher. That is a different nine from the one in Amazon’s marketing, which claims graphics roughly nine times faster than any tablet the company has shipped before. In daily use Pierce found the tablet quick enough, apart from an app switcher that sometimes stuttered, though he worries about how it will age.
Amazon rates the tablet at up to 16 hours of video playback. Pierce got about eight hours of screen time and says that is less than Amazon advertises, although the two figures measure different things, video playback against his mixed use, so they are not directly comparable. The optional keyboard case costs $149.99 and the pen $89.99. He found the pen smooth but said few Android apps support a stylus.
The software is where the review turns sour. These tablets run full Android with Google’s Play Store, which Pierce calls a major improvement on the custom operating system Amazon’s Fire tablets used for about 15 years. Amazon then added a slide-over content panel, preloaded its own apps and placed two non-removable homescreen widgets that exist mainly to advertise Amazon products. His workaround is to install a different launcher straight away, which Android allows in about half a minute.
Alexa Plus fares worse. Pierce says it tends to assume you want to shop for whatever is on screen, is slow, loses the thread of longer conversations and lacks enough access to his apps and data to be useful. He recommends switching the default assistant to Google’s Gemini in settings. The finding lands as other companies push assistants into home devices: Apple’s HomeView launch rests on its own rebuilt Siri, and, as the Eastern Herald reported in June, Google’s first new smart speaker in six years kept its best features behind a subscription. One reviewer’s experience is not a measurement of how Alexa Plus performs for everyone.
The verdict is hedged. For the same $550, Pierce says, a buyer can get a base iPad with 256GB of storage, and he would probably tell most people to buy the iPad for its tablet software, its large-screen apps and Apple’s record in tablets. Yet he reports reaching for the Alexa Tablet whenever he wanted to watch or read, and he tells Galaxy Tab shoppers this is the better buy for almost everyone. He would not use it as a primary computer, given the state of large-screen Android apps.
The Eastern Herald has not tested the device, and this report relies on Amazon’s specifications and one published review. The review does not settle how the standard-display version compares with the Nanomatte one, whether software updates will improve battery life, or how the tablet will behave in other markets, since Amazon’s announcement names only the United States, Mexico and Canada for the first shipments. The hardware argument is the easy part. Whether the software can be made trustworthy enough to buy at iPad prices is the part Amazon has yet to answer.
