Amazon’s Alexa Tablet 12 Pro Review: The Screen Is the Story

Let’s be honest: you don’t buy the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro for its processors, its cameras, or even its software. You buy it for that screen. It’s the first thing you notice when you pick the tablet up, and for many people, it might be the only thing that really matters. Amazon’s new 12-inch flagship tablet is built around a huge 2800 x 1840 display, and Amazon has wrapped that display in a technology it calls Nanomatte. The idea is simple enough: cut down on glare, make the panel easier to look at in bright light, and create the sense that the images onscreen are almost touchable. When Amazon decided to make the best tablet it has ever shipped, the company started right there, with the screen. After spending time with the device, I understand why.

The $549.99 model I’ve been testing is just one of four new tablets in Amazon’s revamped Alexa Tablet lineup. The family starts at $229.99 for an 8-inch model and goes all the way up to a $679.99 version of the 12 Pro that adds the Nanomatte coating and some extra RAM that most people probably won’t need. The pitch across the lineup is the same: these are well-built midrange Android tablets that give you access to the full Play Store, while also loading a bunch of Amazon integrations whether you want them or not. I haven’t tested any of the cheaper models, but I’m glad they exist. Affordable, good-quality Android tablets are surprisingly hard to find, and Amazon has a chance to fill that gap.

Still, the 12 Pro is all about the screen. The Nanomatte finish is an etching process that Amazon says it developed with Corning, and it’s designed to work at the sub-pixel level. That matters because matte displays often create a faint rainbow shimmer when you look at text or fine details. Amazon says it has minimized that problem, and after using the tablet indoors and outside, I think the company mostly succeeded. When I use an iPad outdoors, I frequently see my own reflection staring back at me, like the display has turned into a mirror. The 12 Pro, by contrast, keeps reflections to a small, manageable sheen. Even better, it does this without sacrificing sharpness. The viewing angles are also excellent. I wouldn’t have minded a bit more raw brightness, but the entire point of cranking brightness on most tablets is to fight glare, and this screen simply doesn’t have that problem in the first place.

That doesn’t mean the display is flawless. The anti-glare texture gives the Alexa Tablet a faint, papery shimmer, especially if you’re reading light text on a black background. And while the 12 Pro’s LCD is very good, it still isn’t an OLED. When I watched a movie with letterbox bars above and below the image, those bars were still subtly lit, whereas an iPad with an OLED panel would show them as pure black. Some of those issues can be tuned away. The 12 Pro includes display modes that automatically adjust tone and color to make reading easier, and there are a few picture presets similar to what you’d find on a modern television. My review unit arrived in “Boosted” mode, which pushed colors a little too far. I switched it to “Natural” and immediately liked the image much better.

Is this a revolutionary display? Maybe not. But I will admit that I reflexively said “whoa” the first time I powered the tablet on, and the only thing on the screen was the Amazon logo. The 120Hz refresh rate makes everything look smooth, whether I was playing games or simply scrolling through websites. The 3:2 aspect ratio is also a good fit for reading and for placing two apps side by side. The more subtle display modes are especially nice for long reading sessions, though it is annoying that they only work inside the Kindle app. For several days, I used the Alexa Tablet for web browsing, streaming video, and reading, and I found myself preferring its screen to any iPad I’ve tried. I should note that I did not have an iPad Pro with Apple’s nano-texture glass on hand to compare it directly, but that’s a $2,200 tablet. I doubt many people are trying to decide between those two.

Of course, putting all of that display technology into a $549.99 tablet means Amazon had to skimp somewhere else. This is not a performance monster. The MediaTek Dimensity 8400 chip inside the 12 Pro benchmarks somewhere between a last-generation flagship Android phone and a flagship phone from two years ago. Next to practically every current iPad, the Alexa Tablet gets blown away. In one graphics-heavy benchmark, for example, the latest 13-inch iPad Pro scored roughly nine times higher. I would love to have more horsepower under the hood. But in everyday use, I found plenty of power for the things most people do with tablets. I spent several days playing games, doing a little work, and watching a lot of NFL RedZone, and the only slowness I noticed was the occasional stutter from the Android app switcher. I do worry a little bit about how the tablet will age, since it doesn’t have the iPad’s ridiculous surplus of processing power, but for now, it’s fine.

And “fine” is honestly a good way to describe a lot of the 12 Pro’s hardware. The four speakers are a bit thin and slightly muddy, though they get loud enough and remain clear. The cameras wash out certain colors, but they’re perfectly usable for video calls. The $149.99 keyboard case is comfortable to type on, but it’s awkward to detach and manipulate when you want to use the tablet as a tablet. The $89.99 stylus is smooth and responsive, but there still aren’t many Android apps that truly support a stylus. The battery lasts about eight hours of screen-on time in my testing, which is a little less than I would like and less than Amazon’s advertised numbers. None of these things are deal-breakers. They just add up to a lot of midpack mediocrity around a truly great screen.

The software situation is where the Alexa Tablet goes from good to complicated. The big news is that these tablets run full Android rather than the strange, off-brand operating system Amazon has used on Fire tablets for the last 15 years. That means you get access to every app in the Play Store, a much better interface, and the ability to use Google’s Gemini assistant. Simply by making that switch, Amazon has created the most functional tablets it has ever sold. The old Fire OS always felt like a walled garden with a few gaps in the fence. The Alexa Tablet lineup now opens the whole thing up.

Unfortunately, Amazon did exactly what you might fear to Android: it Amazon-ified the experience. I don’t mind the slide-over panel to the left of the home screen that is filled with content recommendations. The overlap between Alexa Tablet owners and Prime subscribers or Kindle readers is probably high, and that panel isn’t staring at you every time you unlock the device. I can even accept Amazon preloading its own browser, photos, and music apps, even though none of them are better than the competition. What I cannot accept is the two separate, non-removable home screen widgets that exist for no other purpose than advertising Amazon’s products. For a company that loves to say it “obsesses over customers,” it is frankly outrageous to take over the top-left corner of the home screen to show an ad that vaguely invites you to “Cook with premium ingredients” and launches an also impossible-to-hide Alexa chat window in the bottom-right corner. There is nothing customer-first about turning a paid device’s home screen into a billboard.

Luckily, this is Android, so the fix is easy: install a different launcher. It takes 30 seconds, and if you buy an Alexa Tablet, I highly recommend doing it right away.

I would also be less annoyed by Alexa’s constant presence if Alexa Plus were actually useful. It mostly is not. If you want to buy something, Alexa Plus is your personal shopping bot. You can invoke it in any app, and more often than not, it will assume your goal is to shop for whatever is on the screen. But if you want to do almost anything else, you’re out of luck. Almost a year after its launch, Alexa Plus is still not a very good assistant. It’s slow, it loses the thread of back-and-forth conversations, and it still doesn’t have enough access to my apps and data to feel genuinely helpful. If you buy this tablet, go into the settings and switch the default assistant to Gemini. You’ll be much happier.

Once you strip away all of Amazon’s additions, you’re left with a genuinely useful Android tablet. This is where the Alexa Tablet becomes harder to evaluate. I would not recommend it as a primary computer. The state of large-screen Android apps is still disappointing, and I really hope Google is learning a lesson about incentivizing developers to care about big screens and keyboards. But if you’re looking for a tablet to do tablet things — read books, watch shows, browse the web, play games — the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro is suddenly one of the best options you can buy. The Kindle-specific display mode is excellent, the Play Store gives you access to every streaming and reading app you could want, and then there’s that screen. That screen really is special.

Still, the practical question for most buyers is probably whether to choose the Alexa Tablet or an iPad. For the same $550 you’d spend on the 12 Pro, you can buy a base-model iPad with 256GB of storage. And honestly, I’d probably tell most people to buy the iPad. It has much better tablet software, much better big-screen apps, and Apple has a much better track record in this category. The iPad is the safer choice, and for many people, it’s the smarter one.

And yet, I have spent the last few days with both an iPad and the Alexa Tablet sitting on my desk. Every time I wanted to watch something or settle in with a book, I found myself reaching for Amazon’s device. It is just really, really nice to look at. The display makes everything feel a little more inviting, a little less like a glowing mirror and a little more like a piece of paper. That’s a rare quality in a tablet, and it’s enough to make the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro worth a long, careful look — even with all the bloatware, all the mediocrity, and all the “fine” hardware surrounding that gorgeous screen.