When you think of Amazon hardware, premium design and powerful performance probably aren’t the first things that come to mind.
Its Kindles and Fire tablets have typically prioritised affordability above all else – and while that formula has worked, it hasn’t produced the most exciting tech around.
That looks set to change with Amazon’s latest hardware. Its new Kindles and rebranded Alexa tablets are sleeker, smarter and considerably more capable than their predecessors – and although they come with higher price tags to match, I’m surprisingly okay with that.
The Alexa Tablet 12 Pro is the first Amazon tablet I actually want to use
Amazon has been making Fire HD tablets for years, and they’re fine for those that need a cheap tablet for watching videos and keeping the kids entertained – but let’s be honest, they’ve never been that good for much else.
The meagre processor and hardware combination meant they could never really power games beyond basic titles like Candy Crush, and then there was app availability. Despite running on a custom version of Android, Amazon included its own Appstore in place of the vastly more popular Google Play. It had some popular apps, but there was a lot that it didn’t have. You could, of course, sideload apps, but Amazon has been clamping down on that of late.
So when Amazon announced the rebranded Alexa Tablet collection earlier this week, I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.
The headline option is, of course, the new Alexa Tablet 12 Pro; it features a 12-inch 120Hz screen with an optional nanomatte anti-glare screen that should do a great job of dissipating reflections – much like Apple’s top-end iPhone Duo. Amazon has further leant into this by including a special reading mode that activates when accessing the Kindle app, making it a pretty competent…