When you first boot up the Alexa tablet, it’s obvious that this is an Amazon first. The home screen has shortcuts to various company apps such as Kindle, Luna, Prime Video, Audible and Amazon’s Silk browser. But there is also a folder with many Google apps like Gmail, Maps, Meet, YouTube and more ready to use. And as a full-fledged Android tablet, I was able to quickly download Chrome and various other apps from the Play Store. So even though Amazon’s services are offered out of the box, it’s pretty simple to swap them out with the apps you want.
There are also a few other UI changes that make this tablet more Amazon than Android. There are two widgets on the home screen; the 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 latest Kindle book or playing an album on Amazon Music, for example, or continue searches 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 opens a chat window with Amazon’s virtual assistant. Naturally, you can also say “Hey Alexa” to initiative requests with your voice. Surprisingly, there is also a Google search widget in the upper right corner of the home screen. So while Amazon clearly wants to offer Alexa+, it’s not against giving Google some screen real estate as well.
Beyond the reading experience I described earlier, the Alexa tablet is more than capable of doing most of the things people want from a tablet. The beautiful screen makes it a great choice for watching movies or gaming on YouTube, and the speakers support Dolby Atmos. This doesn’t mean much on a small device, but I definitely got some semblance of dialogue moving in physical space in a few of the films I watched. The music also sounds surprisingly solid, certainly sufficient for casual listening sessions in a small space. I generally prefer to use headphones or a higher-performance speaker, but the audio quality certainly beats many tiny laptop speakers I’ve heard over the years.
Nathan Ingraham for EngadgetOther apps I installed from the Play Store worked fine, for the most part. The inescapable fact that has always held Android tablets back is that few 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 put it: it still feels like an enlarged phone app rather than something designed to use the entirety of a large screen.
While this is certainly disappointing, many of the most popular apps people use work just fine. Adobe’s Lightroom is well optimized for tablets at this point, as is my favorite task manager, Todoist. And Google’s apps were all redesigned for larger screens 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 work well on the Alexa tablet.
Amazon has also built in some pretty solid multitasking capabilities here. When an app is in full-screen mode, you can tap a bar at the top of the screen to put it in split view with a second app, or send it to the “desktop.” Desktop view allows you to resize and layer multiple applications as you wish. I’ve opened half a dozen at a time with no real problem, but the Alexa tablet’s screen isn’t so big that it makes perfect sense to run more than a handful at a time.
The MediaTake Dimensity 8400 processor that powers the Alexa tablet was also more than capable of keeping up with everything I did. The model I’m testing has 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, but you can double those two if you think you need it. Personally, I’d choose to upgrade to the nanomatte display before maxing out the RAM or storage, but that’s just me. That said, there were a handful of times where apps became unresponsive, and navigating different apps was a little slower than I’d like.
As for the battery, I haven’t yet had time to test Amazon’s claims of 16 hours of video playback, but I get close to eight hours without a charger when using it for various work-related tasks like editing stories, chatting in Slack, browsing with Chrome, and writing this review in Google Docs. I’ll update this story with more concrete battery references soon.
Gn tech
