Amazon Ditches Fire Branding for Alexa Tablets — and May Be Building Toward a Phone

TITLE: Amazon Ditches Fire Branding for Alexa Tablets — and May Be Building Toward a Phone
KEYWORD: alexa tablets
DESCRIPTION: Amazon’s new Alexa Tablets drop Fire branding, embrace Android and Google Play, and hint at a long-rumored Amazon smartphone powered by Alexa+.

Amazon has quietly closed the book on 15 years of Fire tablets, replacing the familiar budget lineup with a trio of premium devices called Alexa Tablets. The rebrand, announced this week, is more than cosmetic. For the first time, Amazon’s tablets run full, Google-certified versions of Android complete with the Play Store — a dramatic reversal for a company that spent over a decade insisting its forked software and walled-off Appstore were good enough.

The shift comes months after Amazon shut down its own app store, effectively admitting that Fire OS’s limited app selection had become a liability rather than a point of differentiation. Now, with the Alexa Tablets, Amazon is betting that access to Google’s full app ecosystem, paired with a much deeper integration of its Alexa+ assistant, will make its hardware competitive again against Apple’s iPad lineup and other Android slates.

What’s Inside the New Alexa Tablets

The lineup consists of three aluminum-bodied devices. The Alexa Tablet 8 starts at $230, while the Alexa Tablet 11 runs $330; both use the budget MediaTek 8189 chip and feature 16:10 displays suited for video streaming. The flagship, the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro, starts at $500 and takes a different approach with a 3:2 aspect ratio better suited to multitasking, a sharper 2800×1840 display with a 120Hz refresh rate, and a more capable MediaTek Dimensity 8400 processor paired with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Amazon also sells an optional keyboard and stylus for the Pro model, along with a matte display upgrade, pushing it firmly into productivity-tablet territory once reserved for iPads and Surface devices.

That premium push isn’t new for Amazon. Panos Panay, the former Microsoft Surface chief who joined Amazon’s devices division in 2023, has been steering the company toward higher-end hardware, from redesigned Echo speakers to slimmer aluminum Kindles. The Alexa Tablets fit squarely into that strategy, trading Fire’s cut-rate plastic for a look and feel much closer to Apple’s own tablets.

Alexa+ Takes Center Stage

While the hardware upgrades are notable, the bigger story may be how central Alexa+ has become to the experience. A persistent “Ask Alexa” widget sits on the home screen, and the assistant now supports “On-Screen Intelligence” — the ability to read whatever is on the display and answer contextual questions, similar to Google’s Gemini or Apple’s Siri. Users can ask Alexa to summarize a webpage, check whether a product seen in a YouTube video is available on Amazon, or find restaurants mentioned in an article that are closest to their office.

Alexa+ also now supports free-flowing “live sessions” for back-and-forth conversation, akin to Gemini Live or ChatGPT’s Voice Mode, and visual intelligence that lets the tablet’s camera identify objects and offer advice — point it at a leaking pipe, for instance, and ask how to fix it. Amazon says anyone who buys an Alexa Tablet gets Alexa+ included at no extra cost, a notable perk given the assistant normally requires a subscription or Amazon Prime membership.

Amazon’s vice president of devices, Kevin Keith, told Wired that the company previously “didn’t really have the right product” to showcase these AI capabilities — something the new tablets are meant to fix.

A Blueprint for an Amazon Phone?

The redesign has fueled speculation that Amazon is laying groundwork for something bigger: a smartphone. Reuters reported earlier this year that Amazon is developing a device codenamed Transformer, built around Alexa+ and reportedly featuring a generative, AI-driven interface that could reduce reliance on traditional apps. When asked directly whether the Alexa Tablets represented a dry run for a phone, Keith demurred, calling it “an interesting idea” while declining to confirm anything.

The caution is understandable. Amazon’s last foray into phones, the 2014 Fire Phone, was a well-documented disaster — plagued by a thin app ecosystem, gimmicky 3D-display features, and dismal sales that led to its quick discontinuation. By retiring the Fire name entirely and building genuine Android compatibility into its tablets first, Amazon appears to be hedging against a repeat failure, ensuring any future phone wouldn’t launch into the same app-starved environment that doomed its predecessor.

Whether or not a phone materializes, the Alexa Tablets signal a clear strategic pivot: Amazon is leaning harder into AI-driven shopping assistance delivered through premium hardware, rather than cheap devices subsidized by content sales. With smartphones already driving the majority of US online purchases, giving Alexa+ a foothold on more personal, always-with-you devices would give Amazon tighter control over how people shop — and make its AI assistant impossible to ignore along the way.

The new Alexa Tablets are available for preorder now and begin shipping October 14. Given Amazon’s marketing reach and its own retail platform, they are likely to become some of the most widely used Android tablets on the market almost overnight — Fire branding or not.

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