Alexa Tablet 12 Pro Review: Amazon Comes Out Swinging At The iPad

Christian de Looper/BGRAmazon appears ready to fundamentally change how it approaches tablets. The Fire Tablet line has long been known for being dirt cheap, so much so to where it's commonly recommended to parents who want something for their children. That's not a bad thing, of course. It's just a strategy, but it has meant that Amazon has had to cut costs where it can, making for ultra low quality tablets that do what they're made to do and not much else.

Now, Amazon is ready to take a different approach. Its new line of Alexa Tablets are built to compete directly with the iPad, with the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro being the highest-end of the bunch. To do this, Amazon has made some serious changes. For starters, it's actually using premium materials and high-end internal components. Not only that, but it has ditched the Amazon proprietary fork of Android and is actually offering Google Play services on its new devices.

So, with all these changes, has Amazon succeeded in building a tablet that can become the de facto option for those who don't want an iPad? I've been testing the $500 Alexa Tablet 12 Pro to find out.

Read more: 5 Ways To Fix Alexa's Most Frustrating Problems

If you've used Amazon Fire tablets in the past, that won't have much relevance here, because the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro is nothing like them. Gone is the plasticky, cheap-feeling exterior, replaced with a sleek, flat-edged design that is indeed reminiscent of an iPad. The aluminum unibody is 6.5mm thick, weighs roughly 550 grams, and it feels solid — no flex, no creaking, none of the plasticky cheapness that Amazon's budget tablets were known for.

The tablet only comes in one color, called graphite. It's clean and stylish though additional colors would have been a nice addition. At nearly 12 inches (the display measures 11.95 inches), this isn't a device you'll forget you're holding. Held in hand, it feels like a proper premium tablet, comparable in build quality to the iPad Air and Galaxy Tab S12.

It's heavier than the 11-inch iPad Air and substantially heavier than a Kindle Paperwhite, which tips the scales at around 200 grams. If you're planning to read in bed for hours, the weight becomes noticeable. For desk, couch, or lap use, it's manageable and well-balanced.

When holding the tablet in its vertical orientation, you'll find a USB-C port on the bottom, a power button on the top edge and volume buttons on the right edge. The power button houses a fingerprint sensor, which seemed to work reasonably quickly and accurately in my use.

That right edge — the top edge when you're holding the tablet horizontally — also has a slightly recessed area where the Pen Pro snaps on magnetically to charge and store when it's not in use, which is a neat idea. It's subtle enough to where it won't bother you if you don't buy or use the stylus, but it's there for those who do. Overall, the hardware is solid and sleek. It's a totally different approach compared to previous Amazon tablets, but Amazon nailed the premium tablet feel on its first go.

The display on the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro might well be the coolest thing about it. I say "might," though, because my review unit didn't have the cool new display feature. Amazon's new "Nanomatte" finish essentially takes the concept of a matte glass to a new level. Instead of having a matte coating on the screen, Nanomatte glass has an anti-glare treatment developed with Corning that etches the glass at the sub-pixel level using a photolithography process. I've been a huge fan of matte displays from Apple for their anti-glare properties, and, generally, I'm glad to see it becoming more common.

Alas, that's not the model that I got to test. The Alexa Tablet 12 Pro that I have has a standard glossy screen, which, yes, looks great, but isn't the buzzy new feature that the higher-end model offers.

The screen has an 11.95-inch IPS LCD at 2800 x 1840 resolution in a 3:2 aspect ratio, running at 120Hz with 500 nits of peak brightness. That 120Hz refresh rate alone gives it an edge over the $749 iPad Air, which still ships at 60Hz — in 2026. The 3:2 ratio is a smart choice for productivity, offering more vertical space than the 16:10 panels on most Android tablets. At 280 pixels per inch, text and images look sharp.

It's still an IPS LCD, though, and that carries trade-offs. Blacks aren't as deep as what you'd get from the iPad Pro's OLED panel — letterboxed content shows faintly lit bars rather than true black. And under very strong direct light, colors can look slightly washed out compared to a glossy display. None of these are dealbreakers, but if you need a screen capable of withstanding bright lights, it might be worth going for the Nanomatte model.

Along with the high-end design, Amazon is also leaning into better performance. Under the hood, the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro runs a MediaTek Dimensity 8400 — a 4nm chip with eight Cortex-A725 cores (one at 3.25GHz, three at 3.0GHz, four at 2.1GHz) and an Arm Mali G720 GPU. The base model pairs it with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, while the $679.99 configuration bumps that to 16GB and 256GB of storage. Amazon claims 3x faster processing and 9x faster graphics than any previous Amazon tablet, but that's measured against its own budget Fire hardware — not exactly a high bar. In fact, I'd expect better than that, but that's beside the point.

Ultimately, the Dimensity 8400 indeed provides higher performance than previous-generation Fire tablets. That said, it's not going to compete with Apple's M-series chips in its higher-end iPads. It's a mid-range processor at this point, which is to say that it'll handle most of what you can throw at it when it comes to productivity but isn't going to be as fast when it comes to mobile gaming. The iPad Air's M4 chip outperforms it handily, and the 13-inch iPad Pro's M5 scored roughly nine times higher in one graphics benchmark during testing. Samsung's Galaxy Tab S12 also offers more raw power. For a tablet priced at $500 and up, that performance gap is hard to ignore.

But the tablet isn't slow. Browsing, streaming, note-taking, and casual multitasking all felt smooth. I did notice occasional stutter when switching between heavier apps or loading complex web pages — the kind of slight pauses that wouldn't show up on an iPad Air or Galaxy Tab S12. But, to be fair, those issues were quite rare and never distracted from what I was doing. Overall, the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro is a capable tablet that performs quite well.

Still, there's no guarantee the device will keep that performance up for very long. One of the best things about the iPad line is that there's enough performance headroom to support iPadOS updates for years after the hardware debuts. We'll have to wait and see how the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro does in that regard.

Generally, I found the battery of the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro to be quite good. I'm not sure I was able to reach Amazon's listed battery rating, which claims 16 hours of video playback, but those are in ideal conditions, and no one's going to be sitting watching videos for 16 hours. I still found that the tablet was able to get me through a full workday, and most average users will be able to go at least a few days in between charges.

There are some ways to save on battery use, too. Amazon's Kindle Mode extends battery life to a claimed 20 hours by silencing notifications, cutting blue light, and reducing overall power draw — which makes sense if you're dedicating the tablet to reading anyway.

The Alexa Tablet 12 Pro supports 27W charging over USB-C, which is fine, but not all that impressive. You won't get the rapid top-ups that some devices offer at 45W or higher, but it'll take you from low battery to usable within a reasonable window.

Tablet cameras are never expected to be very impressive, and that's good news for the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro because the cameras are mediocre. You should not use this tablet to take photos on vacation. That's what your phone camera is for. But you still might want something that's decent enough for video calls and scanning the occasional document.

The Alexa Tablet 12 Pro comes with a 13-megapixel rear camera with autofocus and an 8-megapixel fixed-focus front camera. That's pretty much in line with what you'll get on other tablets in this price range, including the iPad Air, which also doesn't have a camera that's going to turn heads. Apple does improve the camera experience on the iPad Air with features like Center Stage, though.

In well-lit environments, the rear camera captures reasonably detailed images with accurate color. Autofocus locks quickly and doesn't hunt, which makes it fine for document scans, whiteboard captures, and the kind of quick snapshots you'd take with a tablet. There's nothing special here, but there's nothing broken either.

Low light is where things fall off, as you would expect. Images get noticeably noisy in dimmer environments, and fine detail softens quickly. That's unsurprising for a mid-range tablet sensor, and the iPad Air's rear camera handles the same conditions with more consistency — better exposure, less grain. Neither tablet produces impressive low-light photos, but the iPad holds up better.

For most tablet buyers, the front camera matters more than the rear. As mentioned, on the front you'll get an 8 megapixel camera, and it works perfectly fine for video calls on Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. You'll look fine in good lighting, and the camera was pretty good at avoiding blowing out my face if there were lights in the background.

I wouldn't weigh the cameras heavily in any buying decision here. They handle the basics and don't try to do much beyond that. If tablet camera quality is a priority for you, you're probably already looking at an iPad Pro.

Software is one of the bigger stories of this tablet. That's because Amazon has finally ditched its self-built Android fork in favor of tried and true full Android 16, including Google Play services. That means that, unlike previous Fire OS tablets that didn't have access to the Google Play Store, you'll be able to install any compatible Android app straight from Google Play without issue. It also means that Google's apps and services come pre-installed out of the box. This should be a welcome change for existing Android device users, though others may see it as pointless clutter.

As you would expect, though, the software experience on this tablet is different than you might get on other Android tablets. Amazon has deeply integrated Alexa+ throughout the operating system, including on the home screen. A "Dynamic Tab" in the top left surfaces suggestions, an "Ask Alexa" bar sits at the bottom right, and a swipe-in gesture triggers On-Screen Intelligence — a feature that lets Alexa read and respond to whatever's on screen. On-Screen Intelligence is opt-in and off by default, with a visual indicator when active.

Alexa+ itself works well enough, but if you've spent any time playing around with some of the more advanced AI services on the market, you might not be all that impressed. It's primarily useful as a way to access data on the device or data tied to your Amazon account, but without support for many other connectors and features, it's likely not the AI service to unseat the likes of Claude or ChatGPT. That's despite the fact that it costs the same $19.99 per month as those other services — though, thankfully, it does come free with Amazon Prime.

Old habits die hard, though. Those two home screen widgets aren't removable, and while the "Dynamic Tab" often just shows the time, it also regularly showed me ads for content on Prime Video — which was annoying even if it was content that I had started watching previously. $500 tablets are in a completely different bracket than the cheap tablets that Amazon subsidized with ads before this, and users will expect better from the software when they're paying more cash up front.

Kindle Mode is another highlight — though it would be cooler with the Nanomatte display. When set up, opening the Kindle app silences notifications, reduces blue light, and offers three display themes — Standard, Color Paper (a warm muted palette), and Ink Paper (full grayscale). Annotations with the Pro Pen sync to Kindle Scribe, which is a smart ecosystem touch. Ultimately, I'm glad that Amazon has switched to a more Google-centric Android experience on its tablets, even if that experience is still built for Amazon's apps and services.

Along with the tablet itself, Amazon is selling a few accessories aimed at completing the premium and productivity-focused experience. The first is the $149.99 Pro Keyboard which I liked a lot more than I expected to. The typing experience actually reminded me a lot of Apple's Magic Keyboard, which is a good thing. There's enough travel to make typing feel tactile, and keys were well spaced. I actually quite enjoyed typing on it, even if the general feel was somewhat generic.

Generic is a good thing here, and I think the vast majority of users will find it perfectly usable for typing even for long stretches. The trackpad was solid, too — responsive and accurate, even on the edges. It felt smooth and easy to use, and clicking in was nice and tactile. Again, it reminded me of the Magic Keyboard, though I will say that the Magic Keyboard's touchpad is that extra bit better.

The other accessory that Amazon is offering is the $89.99 Pro Pen. It also felt quite high-quality, and the software has some nice tricks to make it even more useful. You'll get features like the ability to automatically turn handwritten text into typed text. It felt close to Apple's accessories, though I would have liked to try it on the Nanomatte display. I also liked that, like the Apple Pencil, the Pro Pen attaches magnetically to the top of the tablet where it can charge. I'm not sure why anyone is doing anything else at this point.

Amazon clearly wants the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro to be the default Android tablet, at least for Amazon users who regularly watch content on Prime, read books in the Kindle app, and so on. It is indeed quite a nice product with a much more premium build than not only Amazon's previous tablets, but most other Android tablets currently available.

There are some weaknesses, though. The unfortunate reality for Amazon is that it has to compete with the likes of the iPad Air and the base iPad. The base iPad starts at $449 and offers significantly better performance with Apple silicon. The $749 iPad Air has a far more capable M4 chip and a more polished software ecosystem, though it's stuck at 60Hz and lacks any anti-glare display option at that price. Apple's nano-texture glass only appears on the iPad Pro, which makes the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro's Nanomatte option look like a steal. Samsung's Galaxy Tab S series remains the biggest Android tablet competitor and generally offers more processing power per dollar, but it's deeper in Samsung's ecosystem, of course.

Within Amazon's own lineup, the $329.99 Alexa Tablet 11 gives you an 11-inch 2.5K display at 90Hz with 8GB of RAM and full Android for quite a bit less, making it the pick if you don't need the larger screen or Nanomatte finish. The $229.99 Alexa Tablet 8 is a different animal entirely — an 8.7-inch tablet with 4GB of RAM built more for portable media consumption than anything resembling work.

All that said, if you like the design, don't mind Amazon's ads, and don't need the best performance out there, the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro is quite a nice product. It also makes me more excited for Amazon's first-party hardware than I have been in quite some time.