Amazon creeps into the premium tablet market with the Fire Max 11
The Amazon Fire Max 11, with the keyboard and stylus attached. [credit: Amazon ]
Amazon's biggest tablet is the Fire Max 11. It has an 11-inch screen, a fingerprint reader, and an optional keyboard and stylus package. Usually, Fire tablets are cheap consumption devices, but now maybe you can be productive on one?
The tablet starts at $229.99, with the "productivity bundle"-the tablet plus the keyboard and stylus-clocking in at $329.99, or exactly the price of a 9th-gen iPad. For specs, the display is an 11-inch, 2000*1200 60 Hz LCD, and it has 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage (with an option for 128GB), and a "14-hour" battery of unknown size with 15 W charging (you'll only get a 9 W charger in the box, though). The SoC is a Mediatek MT8188J. That's an 8-core chip with two Arm Cortex A78 CPUs (those are the "medium" size CPUs in 2021's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1) and six junky Cortex A55 CPUs for background duty. The GPU is an ARM G57 MC2.
The fingerprint reader is on the side power button. There's also a MicroSD slot for extra storage. The keyboard connects to the tablet via pogo pins that power the keyboard and provide communication. The keyboard isn't backlit. It supports Wi-Fi 6 and sports front and back 8 MP cameras.