Amazon’s latest tablets finally come with the Google Play Store baked right in

The top-of-the-line Alexa Tablet 12 Pro will be available with an optional Nanomatte finish for reduced display glare. Amazon’s latest tablets finally come with the Google Play Store baked right in.

Amazon first got into the tablet game with the Kindle Fire. It later dropped the “Kindle” branding to emphasize that its tablets do more than its e-readers.

Amazon today announced a new lineup of Alexa Tablets, introducing three aluminum tablets with Google Play access, integrated Alexa+, and prices starting at $229.99 to compete with Apple’s iPad lineup. The new tablets run Android, moving away from Amazon’s Fire OS and its separate app store.

Amazon’s best tablet ever didn’t have to work hard for the title, but a new nanomatte screen and Kindle mode sweeten the deal. Amazon Alexa Tablet 12 Pro vs Amazon Fire HD 10: What’s changed, and is the upgrade worth it.

And now the company is changing tack again with the introduction of the Amazon Alexa tablets. As you can tell from the name, AI is a big part of this.

Google Play support brings access to apps such as YouTube, Gmail, and Google Docs, addressing a longstanding limitation of Amazon’s tablets. The flagship Alexa Tablet 12 Pro starts at $499.99 with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, aiming to rival the iPad Pro at a significantly lower price point.

That may sound like high praise, but the e-retailer’s tablet lineup has always been aimed at the bargain bin rather than taking aim at the iPads and Galaxy Tabs of the world. This time around, the new hardware still doesn’t reach those heights, but it flies cleanly in between and soars above its predecessor.

The change in naming also emphasizes that these are fully-featured Android tablets – Fire tablets were known for being cheap but good enough (and did we mention cheap?). The trio of new slates is a lot more capable, but costs have gone up as well.

It features a MediaTek Dimensity 8400 chip, a 12-inch display with an adaptive refresh rate of up to 120Hz and a 3:2 aspect ratio, a 6.5mm-thick aluminum body, Wi-Fi 6E, and quad Dolby Atmos speakers. Amazon claims that the device has up to 16 hours of video playback.

To hear Amazon tell it, the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro is built around two things that could hardly be further apart: reading, and lots of AI. To that end, its marquee features include a "nanomatte" display to better imitate paper, along with a new processor to power Alexa+, the AI-powered version of Amazon’s long-running voice assistant.

And these have full access to… Amazon’s new Alexa Tablets use the Google Play Store and are more capable than Fire tablets.

A $549.99 version adds a "Nanomatte" display, using precision-etched glass developed with Corning to reduce glare. Higher configurations offer up to 16GB of RAM.

Whether or not you’re enthused about the presence of AI here (Amazon would certainly like you to be), it’s hard to turn down better hardware. Compared to the Fire HD 10 tablet, which has until now occupied the top slot in Amazon’s mobile hardware lineup since the Fire Max 11 was quietly discontinued in the US, the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro appears to be a significant upgrade in all the ways that matter.

And these have full access to the Google Play store, meaning that you don’t have to use Amazon’s own app store anymore. The new Amazon Alexa Tablet trio The Amazon Alexa Tablet 12 Pro is the most powerful Amazon tablet to date – the CPU is three times faster and the GPU is nine times faster than that inside the Fire Max 11.