Alexa Tablet 12 Pro: Amazon Finally Goes Full Android — Almost

Alexa Tablet 12 Pro: Amazon Finally Goes Full Android — Almost

After 15 years, the Fire brand burns out

On October 8, Amazon unveiled the Alexa Tablets and quietly killed the Fire tablet line it had sold since 2011. The name is gone, and so is the strategy behind it. Amazon says it will keep selling through existing Fire inventory and provide four years of security updates for the final units, but no new Fire hardware is coming. Panos Panay, who runs Amazon's devices business, framed the shift bluntly to Bloomberg: the Fire line "wasn't giving customers what they were asking for."

Three tablets from $229.99 to $679.99

The new lineup has three models plus two Kids editions. The 8.7-inch Alexa Tablet 8 starts at $229.99 with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and roughly 14 hours of video playback. The 11-inch Tablet 11 starts at $329.99 with a 2.5K, 90Hz, 16:10 display, 8GB of RAM and dual Dolby Atmos speakers. The 12-inch Tablet 12 Pro starts at $499.99, rising to $549.99 for the Nanomatte screen and $679.99 for a maxed-out 16GB/256GB version. The Kids Tablets — 8 and 11 inches — cost $229.99 and $329.99.

Nanomatte is the feature that matters

The 12 Pro's headline is its display: a 12-inch, 2800×1840 panel at 280ppi with a 120Hz refresh rate and a 3:2 aspect ratio. Its optional "Nanomatte" coating, developed with Corning, etches an anti-glare texture into the glass at the sub-pixel level — cutting reflections without the text-softening haze of ordinary matte finishes. That is close in spirit to Apple's nano-texture glass. The rest of the spec sheet holds up too: quad Dolby Atmos speakers, Wi-Fi 6E, a 9,000mAh battery with 27W charging, a fingerprint reader in the power button, and a 550-gram, 6.5mm aluminum body.

Full Android, but the bloatware stays

For 15 years, Fire tablets ran Amazon's forked Fire OS and leaned on the Amazon Appstore, which meant Google's own apps were reachable only through a browser. The Alexa Tablets change that. They ship with full Android 16 and the Google Play Store, so YouTube, Netflix, Gmail and millions of other titles install normally — and you can even make Google's Gemini the default assistant. Amazon promises four years of updates and Android 17 in early 2027. The catch: Amazon still layers its own storefront, apps and widgets over the top, and some of those widgets are effectively unremovable ads.

Lock-screen ads survive — except on the flagship

Even the ad model, Amazon's oldest tablet rule, only bends rather than breaks. The cheaper models still carry lock-screen ads: the Tablet 8 costs $229.99 with ads or $249.99 without, and the Tablet 11 runs $329.99 or $349.99. Removing the ads is now a one-time $20 fee, up from $15 under Fire OS. The one clean exception is the 12 Pro, the most expensive tablet in the lineup, which ships without them.

Amazon denies memory prices drove the hike

The price jump is real: the $550 12 Pro costs more than double the $155 base Fire HD 10 and lands squarely in iPad territory, where Apple's tablets run from $449 to $1,199. Amazon raised prices across Echo, Kindle and Fire TV hardware in August, blaming a memory-price crunch, but told CNBC that memory costs did not drive the new tablet pricing. Panay conceded the shortage made building a premium tablet at a reasonable price "quite tricky," while insisting the team avoided trade-offs.

Reviewers love the screen, not the software

Early verdicts split. The Verge scored the 12 Pro a 6, praising the screen, the build and the move to real Android, while faulting pervasive Amazon bloatware and a mediocre Alexa+. Reviewer David Pierce found the assistant assumes you want to shop for whatever is on screen, loses the thread of longer conversations and is slow enough that he suggests switching to Gemini. He also measured about eight hours of screen time against the 16-hour claim. The Shortcut was kinder, calling it "the iPad Pro experience for half the price" with fast everyday performance and a solid 12 to 14 hours of battery.

This is an iPad Air fight, not a Fire fight

Amazon says the 12 Pro's CPU is nearly three times faster and its GPU nine times faster than any tablet it has shipped. The Verge counters that the MediaTek Dimensity 8400 sits between last year's and the year-before's Android flagships, and that a 13-inch iPad Pro scored about nine times higher in one graphics benchmark. The real target is the iPad Air: TechRadar quotes an Amazon VP saying it doesn't "force you to compromise," and with the $149.99 keyboard and $89.99 pen the full kit lands near $790, squarely in iPad Air territory.

Shipping now, Europe on October 19

The Alexa Tablets are on sale now and ship October 14 in the US, Canada and Mexico, with the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain following on October 19. The Kids Tablets reach Japan the same day as North America. For anyone who spent years waiting for a genuinely capable Android tablet, the 12 Pro's screen and software are real progress. What keeps it "almost" is the bloatware, a subpar assistant and a price that drifts into iPad money.