Amazon’s new Alexa Tablets turn the Kindle app into a reading mode that silences notifications, cuts blue light and is rated to last up to 20 hours on a charge. That is less than half the reading time behind the 12-week battery rating of the 2024 Kindle Paperwhite. An Alexa Tablet is a good reading screen for comics, magazines and library books, and the largest one gives a Kindle Scribe owner pen notes on a color page, but it does not replace a Kindle for long novels. Amazon announced the three tablets on October 8, and they ship in the US on October 14.
Three sizes, one reading figure
The lineup runs Android with the full Google Play Store, a first for Amazon’s own tablets, alongside Amazon’s apps for Kindle, Audible and Prime Video.
| Model | Price | Screen | Rated video playback | Pen |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alexa Tablet 12 Pro | from $499.99, Nanomatte from $549.99 | 12 in, 280 ppi, 120 Hz, 3:2 | 16 hours | Pro Pen, $89.99 |
| Alexa Tablet 11 | from $329.99 | 11 in, 2.5K, 276 ppi, 90 Hz, 16:10 | 15 hours | None listed |
| Alexa Tablet 8 | from $229.99 | 8.7 in, resolution not listed | 14 hours | None listed |
Amazon gives the reading figure once, for the Kindle reading mode in general. It does not say which of the three reaches it, at what brightness, or with Wi-Fi on or off.
Twenty hours against twelve weeks
The Paperwhite’s 12-week rating assumes half an hour of reading a day with wireless off and the front light at 13. Multiply it out and the e-reader is rated for 42 hours of reading. At the same half hour a day, a full tablet charge lasts about 40 days, or just under six weeks.
Read for an hour each night and the gap feels larger, because the tablet needs charging about every three weeks, while the Paperwhite at that pace goes about six. Video, Alexa and games draw on the same tablet battery, so evenings that mix a film with a chapter bring the charger out sooner.
What the reading mode changes
The mode starts when you open a book in the Kindle app. Notifications go quiet, blue light drops, and there are three themes: natural color with some warmth, a softened paper tone, and pure grayscale.
A grayscale theme changes the colors on the screen. It does not turn the panel into E Ink, which reflects the light in the room and produces none of its own. The answer to glare is the Nanomatte version of the 12 Pro, whose glass is etched with a pixel-aligned texture in a process developed with Corning. Amazon says it reads well at any angle and in any light, and nobody has measured it yet.
Sharpness is close to an e-reader’s on the two larger models, at 276 and 280 ppi, against the 300 ppi of a Paperwhite. The Tablet 8’s resolution is not listed. The Lenovo Tab One, which has the same 8.7-inch size and weighs 320 g against the Tablet 8’s 329 g, shows how much that number decides: its 1340 by 800 screen works out to about 179 pixels per inch, and small type looks soft.
Pen notes that reach a Kindle Scribe
Only the 12 Pro takes a pen. The Pro Pen is a USI 2.0 stylus with 4,096 pressure levels and tilt detection, docks magnetically, charges wirelessly, and is designed for the 12 Pro alone. In Kindle books you can highlight, underline, write notes and mark up pages, and Amazon says those annotations sync to Kindle apps on pen-supported devices and to the Kindle Scribe.
The pen and the base 12 Pro come to $589.98, or $639.98 with the Nanomatte screen. Amazon’s sync wording covers annotations in books only. It says nothing about Scribe notebooks, so whether handwritten notebooks from a Scribe open on the tablet is still unknown.
Library books and other stores
The Kobo Books, Libby and Google Play Books apps install from Google Play the way they do on any Android tablet, so a library loan can be read in Libby itself, and books bought from Kobo or Google open in their own apps. The quiet reading mode is described only for the Kindle app.
The Apple iPad 11-inch (A16) has offered that range for years. Against it, the Alexa Tablet 11 has the slightly sharper screen, 276 ppi to 264, and a longer rated video playback time, 15 hours to Apple’s 10.
Which reader it suits
Keep the Kindle if novels are most of your reading. The Paperwhite’s rating gives it more than twice the reading hours, on a screen that reflects the room’s light the way paper does. An Alexa Tablet earns its place beside it as the color screen for comics, magazines and Libby loans.
A Scribe owner who annotates Kindle books has one more reason to look. The 12 Pro with the Pro Pen carries those notes onto a 12-inch color page, and it is the only model of the three that takes a pen.
