Amazon’s Alexa Tablets are coming for the iPad

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They’re powerful, priced to move, and filled with AI ideas. Don’t you dare call them Fire tablets.

They’re powerful, priced to move, and filled with AI ideas. Don’t you dare call them Fire tablets.

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Amazon is launching a new lineup of tablets that bear almost no resemblance to any tablet Amazon has ever launched before. They’re not even called Fire, the name Amazon has used for its tablets for the last 15 years. They’re called Alexa Tablets, and they’re designed to do two things: bring Alexa Plus to the center of your whole computing life, and be straight-up excellent tablets.

The most important thing about these new tablets’ software? They run Android. Full, Google Play-supported, all-the-apps Android. There are plenty of preloaded Amazon apps, of course, and some built-in ways to quickly access Prime Video content or shop for basically anything anywhere at any time, but it’s finally offering a proper Android experience. Panos Panay, Amazon’s SVP in charge of all things hardware and Alexa, tells me that “Google Play was a necessity, end of story.”

But Panay picked Android as the second most important thing about the Alexa Tablet. The first, he says, is the hardware. The Alexa Tablet is two and a half years in the making, Panay says, and he directed the team to start completely fresh in their tablet design. “Start from zero, don’t use any components we’ve ever used,” he says he told them. “Just ask, what is it? What is a great piece of hardware and what is it supposed to do?”

There are three devices in the Alexa Tablet lineup, all of which go on sale October 14th. The Tablet 8 has an 8.7-inch screen, starts at $229.99, and seems mostly designed for reading; the Tablet 11 has an 11-inch screen, starts at $329.99, and is more for watching stuff. They’re aimed squarely at the iPad Mini and base iPad, and seem nice enough. But the biggest device in the lineup, the one Panay really wants to tell me about, is the one he thinks really shows off what Amazon is doing here.