Amazon’s Fire tablets are known for being affordable and usually quite small, but the company’s latest slate breaks at least one of those trends, as the Amazon Fire Max 11 has just been announced, and it has an 11-inch 1200 x 2000 screen.
Previously, the biggest Amazon tablet was the 10.1-inch Amazon Fire HD 10, but an extra inch of screen space isn’t all you get here.
For one thing, the Amazon Fire Max 11 has an 8MP front-facing camera that’s ideally positioned for landscape video calls. That means the lens is halfway down one of the long sides of the slate, which makes a lot more sense for a tablet, as they’re almost always used in landscape orientation for video chats. This isn't the first Fire with that design, but it's something a lot of tablets don't have.
That positioning and the 11-inch size actually makes this potentially one of the closest rivals to the iPad 10.9 (2022), as that has an almost identical screen size and is also the first iPad to have a landscape selfie camera, as well as being one of the cheapest iPads – though it’s still more expensive than Amazon’s slate by quite a way.
Other highlights of the Amazon Fire Max 11 include a 2.2GHz octa-core chipset along with 4GB of RAM. That might not sound special, but Amazon claims this makes it almost 50% faster than the company’s next-fastest tablet.
Amazon also claims that with an aluminum build and a strengthened glass screen, it’s three times as durable as the iPad 10.9 (2022), and the tablet promises 14 hours of battery life, and comes with Dolby Atmos audio and a choice of 64GB or 128GB of storage.
Rounding out the specs, there’s an 8MP camera on the back, a fingerprint sensor – another novel addition for the Fire tablet series – and, of course, it comes with Amazon’s Alexa assistant built in.
There are also accessories for it, including a detachable keyboard case and a stylus, so this could be just as good for productivity and creation as a basic iPad.
The price for the Amazon Fire Max 11 itself starts at $244.99 / £249.99 (around AU$370), but you can get a bundle with those accessories for $344.99 / £374.97 (around AU$530). Separately, the keyboard case retails for £89.99 (roughly $110 / AU$170), while the stylus costs £34.99 (approximately $45 / AU$65).
On paper, this sounds like it could be one of the best cheap tablets (not to mention worthy of our best Amazon Fire tablet list), and if you like the sound of all this, you can pre-order the Amazon Fire Max 11 now in the US and UK (with Australia not likely to get it, based on past form), and it will ship from June 14 – though you might want to wait until we’ve put it through a full review.
