Amazon is beefing up its Hearth pill line.

The corporate introduced Tuesday the brand new Hearth 11 Max(opens in a brand new tab), an 11-inch, Alexa-enabled machine with a premium design that helps a brand new full-size removable Keyboard Case ($89.99) and Made for Amazon Stylus Pen ($34.99). Billed as an “leisure powerhouse,” it is Amazon’s largest, brightest, and most succesful pill up to now.

The Hearth 11 Max is obtainable for preorder as of Might 23 as a standalone machine beginning at $229.99 and as a part of a Productiveness Bundle(opens in a brand new tab) with its keyboard case and stylus beginning at $329.99. (That saves you nearly $25 versus buying the equipment individually, and features a free three-month trial of Microsoft 365 Private value about $21.) Each will ship subsequent month.

You may write or draw on the Hearth 11 Max with the brand new battery-powered Made for Amazon Stylus Pen, with no pairing required.
Credit score: Amazon

“The workforce has packed in a tremendous variety of premium options…all at an unimaginable worth,” Kevin Keith, vice chairman of Amazon Units, stated in an announcement. “The brand new Hearth Max 11 is proof you will get all the pieces you want from a pill with out paying premium costs.”

Amazon nonetheless has a methods to go if it needs to make a pill that competes immediately with the likes of an Apple iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab, to be clear. However this looks like an even bigger step in that course in comparison with earlier Hearth tablets, which have been falling squarely throughout the “price range” class for years.

For starters, the Hearth 11 Max ditches its predecessors’ colourful plastic construct for extra grown-up grey aluminum with slim bezels and strengthened alumino-silicate glass. Amazon says it is thrice as sturdy because the $449 Tenth-generation iPad from October 2022, however drop-test at your individual danger.

The display itself has a 2,000 x 1,200 decision at 213 pixels per inch (ppi) with 410 nits of brightness. It ought to look sharp and vibrant however go simple in your eyeballs, having been licensed for low blue mild, which makes the Hearth 11 Max promising for streaming and gaming. Like Amazon’s different tablets, it additionally comes with a built-in Alexa assistant and a “Present Mode” that turns it right into a de facto good house hub.

You may boot up the Hearth 11 Max simply by touching the built-in fingerprint sensor on its energy button, which is a primary for an Amazon pill. It runs on a 2.2Ghz octa-core processor with 4GB of RAM and WiFi 6 connectivity, which supposedly makes it nearly 50 p.c quicker than the $179.99 Hearth HD 10 Plus(opens in a brand new tab) from 2021; that one has a 2.0Ghz octa-core processor and the identical quantity of reminiscence.

The Hearth 11 Max is available in grey. Simply grey.
Credit score: Amazon

Amazon has additionally given the Hearth 11 Max new storage choices of 64 or 128GB (each expandable by as much as 1TB by way of microSD card) and bumped its battery life to as much as 14 hours per cost (or two hours longer than the Hearth HD 10 Plus). Nevertheless, it does not include wi-fi charging — that is nonetheless a Hearth HD 10 Plus unique.

The opposite notable Hearth 11 Max upgrades went to its cameras: There’s an 8MP front-facing lens and an 8MP rear one with auto-focus and 1080p HD video recording. The Hearth HD 10 Plus had 2MP front-facing and 5MP rear-facing cameras with 720p HD video recording, for comparability’s sake.

The Hearth 11 Max turns right into a 2-in-1 machine with the brand new Keyboard Case, which options two customizable shortcut keys, 15 pre-programmed shortcut keys, and trackpad gestures for quick navigation. It attaches to the pill magnetically, so there is not any setup or Bluetooth connecting required (although the Hearth 11 Max does assist it if you wish to use a third-party keyboard). The identical goes for the brand new Made for Amazon Stylus Pen, which presents as much as six months of battery life.

There is no child model of the Hearth 11 Max, like there’s with the Hearth 7(opens in a brand new tab), HD 8(opens in a brand new tab), and HD 10(opens in a brand new tab), although it helps as much as 4 baby profiles (along with two grownup profiles), and you’ll allow parental controls from there.