Play Store access is one upgrade in Amazon's $550 Alexa Tablet 12 Pro

For years, a Fire tablet owner who wanted an app the Amazon Appstore did not stock had nowhere else to go. Engadget wrote that Fire tablets were "saddled with the limited selection in the Amazon Appstore for years" ^[3]. For most buyers I think the store matters more than the keyboard. The Alexa Tablet 12 Pro runs Android with the Play Store ^[2], and Engadget wrote that this means Alexa Tablets "can download and run far more apps than they ever could with Fire OS and the Amazon Appstore" ^[4].

Amazon is pitching one thing and expecting buyers to do another. Engadget calls the 12 Pro "a clear competitor to the iPad Pro" ^[1] and says the keyboard and stylus support makes it "a potential productivity tool" ^[5]. The use Amazon itself describes is smaller. Engadget wrote that the chip handles "the web browsing, video streaming and light productivity tasks Amazon imagines people will use Alexa Tablets for" ^[7]. That expectation, as relayed by Engadget, is the only account so far of what owners will actually do with it ^[7].

Amazon spent its budget on the screen. Amazon's Panos Panay said in briefings with Engadget and other outlets that the screen was the "one thing" the company would not compromise on ^[8]. It is a 12-inch, 120Hz LCD at 2,800 x 1,840 and 280ppi, with 500 nits of brightness ^[9]. The 13-inch iPad Pro has fewer pixels per inch, at 264ppi ^[10]. Its tandem OLED panel, though, reaches 1,000 nits and has higher contrast ^[11].

The matte finish is where the price gap is widest. Amazon's Nanomatte glass, co-developed with Corning, cuts glare and makes the Kindle app look more like paper ^[12]. Apple sells its nano-texture glass only on 1TB and 2TB iPad Pros ^[13]. The 1TB 13-inch model costs $2,199 ^[14]. That iPad costs $1,649 more than the Alexa Tablet, about four times as much ^[19][20].

Work is where the iPad comparison breaks down. The MediaTek Dimensity 8400 came out in 2024 and was built mainly for phones. It is not a laptop chip like the M5 in the iPad Pro ^[6]. The 128GB Alexa Tablet has 8GB of RAM and the 256GB model has 16GB ^[15]. Every iPad Pro starts at 12GB ^[16]. Engadget says those specs give the iPad more power for editing and rendering video ^[17]. It also notes that the Play Store still has fewer apps built for tablets than Apple's App Store ^[18].

Two questions settle the choice. The first is workload: reading, streaming, browsing and documents, or video editing and rendering. The second is apps: whether the few apps a person opens every day have proper tablet versions on Android. Light work plus Android tablet apps points to the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro, and a need for a matte screen makes that case stronger at $550. Heavy work, or a daily app that is only good on iPadOS, points to the iPad Pro at its price. In the mixed cases I'd let the app question decide, because the chip gap only bites on the heavy tasks. For a team buying for readers and note-takers, I'd buy the Amazon tablet. The tradeoff is 4GB less base memory than any iPad Pro ^[21] and a chip Engadget does not put in the laptop class ^[6].