Hands-on with Amazon’s Alexa Tablet 12 Pro and its wild new matte display

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The Alexa line is also Amazon’s first tablet to run full-fledged Android with access to the Play Store.

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Amazon’s Fire tablets are notable for being dirt cheap. While they’re great for kids, they don’t offer a premium Android tablet experience. The company’s new $499 Alexa Tablet 12 Pro is an attempt to build a device someone might actually want to use. It’s one of a few new Android tablets Amazon announced today, and it’s the one you need to know about.

Unlike the Fire Tablet lineup, the Alexa Tablet doesn’t run some hobbled version of Android stuck with Amazon’s app store with ads for Amazon services at every turn. It has full access to the Google Play app store. It’s powered by 8GB or 12GB of RAM with a MediaTek Dimensity 8400 8-core CPU. That’s more than enough for light gaming, powering Alexa, and running basic apps, but don’t expect Alien: Isolation to run super smoothly. The aluminum unibody feels great. It’s light at 550 grams (1.2 pounds), but not flimsy. It’s slightly lighter than the 13-inch iPad Air (617 grams) but heavier than the

The screen is the truly exciting thing about the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro. The $549.99 Alexa Tablet 12 Pro has a 12.3-inch 3:2 display that can be configured with Corning’s Nanomatte tech, similar to Apple’s nano-texture, which reduces glare and gives the screen a more paper-like feel.

It’s impossible to do it justice in photos or video. The Nanomatte coating doesn’t simply reduce glare; it almost completely eliminates it. Amazon held a briefing in a brightly sunlit room, and I thought the 12 Pro was a dummy unit when I first saw it. It looked like a cardboard placeholder image was placed inside. Then an Amazon rep started swiping around the screen.