When you first start up the Alexa Tablet, it’s obvious that this is an Amazon-first affair. The home screen has shortcuts to a variety of the company’s apps like Kindle, Luna, Prime Video, Audible and Amazon’s own Silk browser. But there’s also a folder with a bunch of Google apps like Gmail, Maps, Meet, YouTube and more ready to go. And as a full-fledged Android tablet, I was able to quickly download Chrome and a variety of other apps from the Play Store. So while Amazon’s services are right up front, it’s easy enough to swap them out with your apps of choice.
There are a few other UI tweaks that make this tablet more Amazon than Android, as well. There are two widgets on the home screen; one in the upper-left corner shows content you’ve interacted with recently on Amazon’s apps. I can quickly tap to resume reading my last Kindle book or playing an album on Amazon Music, for example, or continue searches that I was doing with the Alexa+ app. Speaking of Alexa+, there’s a widget in the bottom right corner of the home screen that automatically pulls up a chat window with Amazon’s virtual assistant. Naturally, you can also say “Hey Alexa” to initiative requests with your voice, as well. Surprisingly, there’s also a Google search widget in the top-right corner of the home screen, too. So while Amazon clearly wants to feature Alexa+, it’s not against giving Google some screen real estate too.
Going beyond the reading experience I described earlier, the Alexa Tablet is more than capable of doing most things people expect from a tablet. The lovely screen makes it an excellent choice for watching movies or binging YouTube, and the speakers support Dolby Atmos. That only means so much on a small device, but I definitely got a semblance of dialog moving through physical space in a few of the movies I checked out. Music sounds surprisingly solid as well, certainly good enough for casual listening sessions in a small space. I generally prefer to use headphones or a more capable speaker, but the audio quality certainly beats many tinny laptop speakers I’ve heard over the years.
Other apps I installed from the Play Store worked well, for the most part. The inescapable fact that has always held Android tablets back is that not many developers optimize apps for larger screens, and that’s still the case here. So while something like Slack is functional enough, it doesn’t have multiple columns so you can see your channels on the left and a chat window on the right, for example. There’s no other way to say it: It still feels like a blown-up phone app rather than something designed to use the entirety of a large screen.
While that’s certainly a bummer, plenty of the most popular apps people use work just fine. Adobe’s Lightroom is nicely optimized for tablets at this point, as is my go-to task manager Todoist. And Google’s apps were all redesigned for bigger screens back when the company tried to make the Pixel Tablet a thing of the past, so using things like Gmail, Keep, Docs and other essential apps works nicely on the Alexa Tablet.
Amazon built in some pretty solid multitasking capabilities here, as well. When an app is in fullscreen mode, you can tap a bar at the top of the screen to put it in a split view with a second app, or send it to the “desktop.” The desktop view lets you resize and overlap multiple apps however you like — I’ve had a half-dozen open at once with no real issues, but the Alexa Tablet’s screen isn’t so large that it makes a lot of sense to run more than a handful at a time.
The MediaTake Dimensity 8400 processor powering the Alexa Tablet was more than capable of keeping up with everything I did, as well. The model I’m testing has 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, but you can double both of those if you think you’ll need it. I’d personally choose to upgrade to the nanomatte display before maxing out RAM or storage, but that’s just me. That said, there were a handful of times apps went unresponsive on me, and alt-tabbing through different apps was a bit laggier than I’d like.
As for the battery, I haven’t had time yet to test Amazon’s claims of 16 hours of video playback, but I’m getting closer to eight hours off the charger when using it for a variety of work-related tasks like editing stories, chattering away in Slack, browsing with Chrome and writing this review in Google Docs. I’ll update this story with more concrete battery benchmarks soon.
