Amazon
Amazon is walking away from 15 years of budget Fire tablets. In their place, the company has launched a new three-device “Alexa Tablet” lineup — the Tablet 8, Tablet 11 and Tablet 12 Pro — built on standard Android with full Google Play Store access, rather than the stripped-down Fire OS that defined the brand for over a decade.
The shift lets buyers install apps like YouTube, Netflix and Gmail natively for the first time, without the sideloading workarounds Fire tablet owners have relied on for years. Pricing starts at $230 for the Tablet 8 and rises to $330 for the Tablet 11, while the flagship Tablet 12 Pro starts at $500 for an 8GB RAM, 128GB storage configuration.
That top-end model is aimed squarely at the iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab line: a 12-inch, 280 PPI display running at 120Hz in a 3:2 aspect ratio, powered by a 4nm eight-core chip Amazon says delivers three times the processing power and nine times the graphics performance of any tablet it has previously shipped. It supports up to 16GB of RAM, Wi-Fi 6E, quad Dolby Atmos speakers and up to 16 hours of video playback on a charge.
Amazon is also offering a $549.99 version of the 12 Pro with what it calls a “Nanomatte” display, developed with Corning, which uses precision-etched anti-glare etching rather than the light-scattering matte coatings found on most anti-glare screens.
Every device in the new lineup ships with Amazon’s Alexa+ generative AI assistant built in, positioning the hardware as much as an AI product as a tablet. The Alexa Tablets go on sale October 14 in the US, Canada and Mexico, with UK, German, French, Italian and Spanish buyers able to order from October 19 — Amazon’s clearest signal yet that it wants premium hardware, not just discount devices, to carry its AI ambitions.
