Amazon's Fire Max 11 wants to dominate the midrange Android tablet market

The most expensive Fire Tablet to date is still well under $300

Although Samsung offers some excellent flagship-worthy tablets capable of competing with the iPad Pro, Android slates really shine in the budget space, and no company has managed to dominate the arena like Amazon. For over a decade, Fire Tablets have delivered acceptable(ish) performance for their price, with the most recent Fire 7 iteration costing just $60 at full price. But today, Amazon is looking to aim at a slightly more affluent audience with its latest addition to the Fire lineup.

The Amazon Fire Max 11 is the company's largest slate yet. It's a step up from previous Fire tablets, with a sharper panel, an aluminum build, and a larger focus on productivity than ever before. But with those enhancements comes a steeper price tag, and it's unclear whether the usual Fire audience will find itself drawn to this $230 device.

The Fire Max 11 is a completely new device for Amazon, representing a more premium version of its previous high-end product, the Fire HD 10 Plus. As you'd expect, the highlight of the Fire Max 11 is its display, an 11" panel with a 2000 x 1200 resolution that, at least on paper, sounds pretty appealing to the eyes.

Its 5:3 aspect ratio is actually a touch wider than the 16:10 displays you'll find on the Fire HD 10 series, which could make Amazon's productivity bundle a little awkward — more on that in a moment. But with 410 nits of brightness, it should be visible even in fairly bright conditions, perfect for watching movies in the back of a car on a long road trip.

Of course, it's not just the display that sets this apart from previous Fire tablets. This slate uses an all-new design, ditching the cheap plastic of previous models for an aluminum shell. At 1.08lbs, it's just a touch lighter than Samsung's similarly-sized Tab S8, which should make it easy to hold for long periods of time. It's a pretty radical redesign — as radical as you can get with tablets, at least — but it does come at the loss of a headphone jack.

As it tries to move into a more premium range, Amazon is adding some quality-of-life improvements to make the Fire Max 11 a little more appealing to potential buyers. It's the first Fire device to sport a fingerprint sensor, with the power button pulling double-duty here. Meanwhile, Amazon is also highlighting its pair of 8MP cameras on the front and back as perfect tools for jumping into video calls, whether with friends or joining colleagues remotely.

But frankly, the biggest issue with Amazon's tablets — aside from their lack of the Google Play Store — has always been their performance. The company is hoping to tackle this with a more powerful processor, but I'm curious how it'll actually perform in day-to-day use. Although Amazon claims a nearly 50% boost in speed compared to its next fastest tablet, that's not saying much. The Fire Max 11 sports a Mediatek MT8188J processor, which appears to be a low-end chip designed for tablets from 2020.

That's not out of the ordinary for Amazon slates — the Fire HD 10 Plus used a Helio P60T — but with this device aiming for a higher-end market, sluggish performance won't be as excusable. Likewise, 4GB of RAM is a paltry amount of memory in 2023, as is capping out at 128GB of storage. Thankfully, the latter can be solved through the microSD card slot. At the very least, the promised fourteen hours of battery life sounds enticing.

The Fire Max 11 is up for pre-order today with a starting price of $230 for the 64GB model. Amazon is also offering it with a keyboard case and stylus pen, priced at $90 and $35 respectively, though you can save some cash by picking up the company's productivity bundle for $330. Both the slate and its optional add-ons will ship on June 14th.

Will is the Phones Editor at Android Police, which means he usually has a dozen different smartphones on his desk at any given time. He covers everything from leaks of your next phone to the components that'll power it. He's got plenty of opinions about the current state of Android phones — thoughts you'll read in his reviews, editorials, and more. You'll also find him writing up our buyer's guides, where he hopes to help shoppers make the right choice in their next phone. Will appears on the Android Police podcast, where he occasionally taunts his co-hosts with bad opinions about smartwatches and charging cables, and writes AP's weekend polls. In his spare time, he produces podcasts, rewatches the same 37 films, and pretends not to have a never-ending backlog of video games. He lives in Buffalo, NY and is willing to give you chicken wing recommendations at any time. Just ask.