Amazon retires Fire tablets, debuts Alexa Tablets with Play Store

Amazon is retiring the Fire tablet brand after 15 years and replacing it with three Android devices sold under the Alexa name. TechCrunch reports that the new line, the Alexa Tablet 8, Alexa Tablet 11, and Alexa Tablet 12 Pro, starts at $229.99 and tops out at $549.99 for a 'Nanomatte' anti-glare 12-inch model developed in partnership with Corning. The US, Mexico and Canada ship on October 14; the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain follow on October 19.

The headline change is the operating system. The devices drop Fire OS for standard Android with the full Google Play Store, so buyers can install YouTube, Netflix and Gmail without the sideloading workarounds that defined the Fire era. An Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch these are "an all-new product line with new hardware and a new OS, rather than a rebrand of Fire Tablets."

Alexa+, Amazon's generative assistant, is built in. Its on-screen mode can act on whatever is open: the company's example is asking Alexa to evaluate hiking trails pulled up in a browser.

The 12 Pro is the halo product. A 12-inch, 280 PPI, 120Hz display sits in a 6.5mm aluminum unibody, and Amazon says the device delivers "nearly three times the processing performance and nine times the graphics performance of any tablet it has shipped before." The 11-inch model is $329.99; the 8.7-inch is $229.99.

Fire itself is winding down. Amazon told CNBC that "while it plans to keep supporting existing Fire tablets, production of new units has ended," according to Quartz. The move puts Alexa+ onto its own hardware shelf, part of a run of Alexa coverage on our tracker that included Amazon's Nova 2.5 Sonic voice model hitting Bedrock earlier this week.