Amazon Alexa Tablet 12 Pro aims to shake up tablets with a matte screen and Android Play Store

The Amazon Alexa Tablet 12 Pro starts at $499.99 in the US with a standard glossy screen, 128GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. The version with the Nanomatte screen costs $549.99 with the same storage and memory, and a top model with Nanomatte and extra RAM costs $679.99. In the UK it starts at £449.99. It is on sale in the US, UK, Canada and other European countries, though Canadian pricing has not been widely reported.

Accessories add up quickly:

• Pro Keyboard case: $149.99, which connects through pins on the bottom edge, so no Bluetooth pairing.
• Pro Pen: $89.99, with 4,096 pressure levels and tilt detection. It snaps magnetically to the top edge to charge.

Amazon also launched two smaller models without the matte screen option: the Alexa Tablet 11 at $329.99 and the Alexa Tablet 8 at $229.99, plus kids’ editions of both at the same prices. The Fire tablets, which ranged from $60 to $280, are being retired. Amazon says it will keep supporting them for four years after the last ones ship.

The 12-inch screen has a 3:2 shape, which suits web browsing and side-by-side apps, and a 120Hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling and games. Amazon worked with Corning, the company behind Gorilla Glass, to etch a texture into the glass that lines up with the screen’s pixels. The goal is to cut reflections without the rainbow shimmer some matte screens have.

Reviewers say it works remarkably well. Side by side with the glossy version in bright sunlight, the glossy screen acted like a mirror while the Nanomatte one stayed readable from almost any angle. One tester said they preferred it to any iPad they had used, though they had not compared it with Apple’s far pricier nano-texture iPad Pro.

It isn’t flawless. Light text on black backgrounds shows a slight shimmer, and because this is an LCD rather than OLED, black bars in movies glow faintly. The preset called Boosted makes colors too vivid, and switching to Natural fixes that.

Open the Kindle app and the tablet switches into Kindle mode automatically. It silences notifications, turns on a blue light filter and stretches the rated battery life from 16 hours to 20. You can pick one of three reading looks: full color, a softer paper tone or grayscale. There is even a page-turn animation. Notes you write with the pen sync to other Kindle devices like the Kindle Scribe. The catch is that these reading modes only work inside the Kindle app.

Alexa+, Amazon’s AI assistant, is everywhere. An Ask Alexa box sits in the bottom-right corner, and a Dynamic Tab in the top-left suggests books, shows or trips based on your Amazon history. You don’t need a subscription to use Alexa+ on these tablets. The most powerful feature, On-Screen Intelligence, lets Alexa see what is on your screen and act on it, such as finding a coffee table from a photo and adding a similar one to your cart. It is off by default and shows an indicator whenever it is active.

This is where reviews turn sour. Testers found Alexa+ underwhelming and the tablet loaded with Amazon apps and recommendations you can’t fully escape. The swipe-right screen shows Amazon’s For You feed instead of Google’s Discover.

The MediaTek Dimensity 8400 chip is the main compromise. In benchmarks it lands between flagship Android phones from one and two years ago, and in one graphics-heavy test the current 13-inch iPad Pro scored about nine times higher. In daily use, reviewers found it smooth enough for games, work and streaming, with only small stutters in the app switcher.

Battery life fell short of Amazon’s claims in testing, at about eight hours of screen time. The four speakers are loud but a little thin, the cameras are fine for video calls, and the keyboard case is pleasant to type on but awkward to remove. At 550 grams it weighs a little less than a 13-inch iPad Air, and the aluminum body feels solid.

The summary from testers: the best tablet Amazon has ever made, and a good midrange Android tablet, held back by too much Amazon.

If you read a lot on a tablet, especially outdoors or near windows, the Nanomatte model is worth the step up, and Kindle mode makes it a capable e-reader that can also run any Android app. If you are upgrading from a Fire HD 10, this is a huge jump in speed, storage and screen quality.

If you mainly want raw power for heavy games or creative apps, an iPad is much faster. And if you dislike shopping prompts and Amazon recommendations, be ready to spend time turning things off.

Amazon promises at least four years of software updates. The tablets launched on Android 16, with Android 17 due early in 2027.