When you first start up the Alexa tablet, it’s obvious that this is an Amazon issue. The home screen has shortcuts to a variety of the company’s apps such as Kindle, Luna, Prime Video, Audible, and Amazon’s Silk browser. But there’s also a folder with a bunch of Google apps like Gmail, Maps, Meet, YouTube, and more ready to use. And as a full 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 very simple, it’s pretty easy to swap them with the apps you choose. There are a few other UI tweaks that also make this tablet more Amazon than Android. There are two widgets on the home screen; one in the top left corner shows content you’ve recently interacted with in Amazon apps. I can quickly tap to resume reading my latest Kindle book or play 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 top right corner of the home screen. So while Amazon clearly wants to introduce Alexa+, it’s not against giving Google some screen real estate as well. Beyond the reading experience I described above, the Alexa tablet is more than capable of doing most of the things people expect from a tablet. The beautiful screen makes it a great choice for watching movies or enjoying YouTube, and the speakers support Dolby Atmos. That alone means a lot on a small device, but I definitely got a semblance of dialogue moving through physical space in some of the movies I watched. The music also sounds surprisingly solid, 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 surpasses many small laptop speakers I’ve heard over the years. Nathan Ingraham for Engadget Other 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 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 put it: it still feels like a blown-up phone app rather than something designed to use the entirety of a large screen. While this is certainly a pain, many of the most popular apps that people use work well. Adobe’s Lightroom is very well optimized for tablets at the moment, as is my Todoist task manager. And all of Google’s apps were 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 works great on the Alexa tablet. Amazon 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 split it with a second app or send it to the “desktop.” Desktop view allows you to resize and layer multiple apps however you want. I’ve had half a dozen open at once with no real problems, but the Alexa tablet’s screen isn’t large enough that it makes much 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 it did. The model I’m testing has 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, but you can double that if you think you’ll need it. Personally I’d choose to upgrade to the nanomate display before maxing out the RAM or storage, but that’s just me. That said, there were a handful of times where apps were unresponsive and navigating through different apps was a little slower than I’d like. As for the battery, I haven’t had time to test Amazon’s claims of 16 hours of video playback yet, but I’m getting closer to eight hours without the charger when using it for a variety of work-related tasks, like editing stories, chatting in Slack, browsing with Chrome, and typing this review in Google Docs. I’ll update this story with more concrete battery benchmarks soon.
