Fractured Ink: Writing In Life's Chaos (audio)

Kindle Fire Max 11 Tablet: A Kindle With Apps

• Diana Dirkby

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Amazon Affiliate Links: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Kindle Fire Max 11: https://amzn.to/48SqFaF
Made for Amazon Stylus: https://amzn.to/44nfOnH
Amazon Fire 11 Keyboard Case: https://amzn.to/4rWdTk8
KEFBWAO Kindle Fire Max 11 case (for tougher protection):  https://amzn.to/454Wxrd

#Kindle #KindleDevices #KindleFire #KindleFireMax11 #Amazonstylus #AmazonKeyboardCase #Amazon #AmazonApps 

A tablet that reads like a Kindle and works like your daily driver can actually exist—and the Kindle Fire Max 11 makes a strong case for it. We share why we upgraded from an older Fire, what changed our reading and note‑taking habits, and how a simple accessory bundle turns this device into a lightweight workstation you can carry anywhere.

First, we break down the hardware and comfort: the 11‑inch display, the surprisingly light feel, and the magnetic stylus that snaps into place. The stylus has an eraser button that works with some apps. Then we get hands‑on with the keyboard case that needs no pairing and doubles as a stand, shifting the Fire Max 11 from a couch reader to a compact writing setup in seconds. From streaming video and browsing newspapers to checking email and Microsoft 365, the Amazon Appstore covers the essentials, and you can still sideload if you crave more.

Reading remains the heart of the story. Inside the Kindle app, we demo highlights, sticky notes, and a clean annotation panel that keeps thoughts organized across chapters. Handwriting‑to‑text works well with the hex‑grip stylus, while on‑screen and physical keyboards make longer notes painless. We also explore Writing Assist—proofreading, rewrites, tone changes, and concise summaries—which helps shape book notes for study, sharing, or memory. If you live in PDFs and layered pen tools, a Kindle Scribe might still be your best friend; if you want one device for reading plus apps, the Fire Max 11 hits the sweet spot. Many readers will find that owning both devices covers every scenario without compromise.

Ready to see whether the Fire Max 11 fits your workflow? Listen now, check the affiliate link in the notes, and if the guide helps, subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a quick review so others can find it.

My published books

“The Overlife: A Tale Of Schizophrenia,” by Diana Dirkby (visit https://amzn.to/454WgW6.) #ad #commissionsearned The link is an Amazon Affiliate Link. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases)

“Three Kidnapped, Three Siblings, Three Furies,” by Diana Dirkby (visit https://amzn.to/42Z81KY. )#ad #commissionsearned The link is an Amazon Affiliate Link. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

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SPEAKER_00:

Hello, I hope you are all having an exciting time uh looking at uh Kindle devices. So today I wanted to talk about the Kindle Fire Max 11. It's a purchase I made during a Black Friday week uh in order to take advantage of the promotions, the discounts. I have uh already a Kindle Fire, but it's really, really old. And I had been um looking for an opportunity to upgrade, and uh Black Friday week provided just that. So I wanted to uh talk a little bit about it because it has uh features different from all the other Kindle devices, and uh the Kindle app uh on uh the Kindle Fire is is a good app in which to read Kindle books. Okay. So first of all, just to show you um mine. Uh it's I ordered the stylus, as you can see, and the stylus is I ordered the default stylus uh from Amazon. It uh it has a magnet, so it it attaches magnetically to the uh Kindle Fire. And uh this case here is the Amazon keyboard case, which uh gives you a physical keyboard uh uh rather than just an on-screen keyboard, and uh that can be very useful. But most of what I talk about today uh doesn't require um either the case or the stylus, but I will make a case for them being uh very so useful and maybe not needed, but so useful that uh I really think you should get them. So the big difference between the Kindle Fire and um the other Kindles, so now I'm gonna do screen share. So here we are. Um this is what I just showed you. This is uh my Kindle Fire Max 11 on my dining room table, complete with its stylus and keyboard case. By the way, it's not very heavy at all. I don't know exactly what the weight is, but uh it's quite light. Now next photo shows uh the stylus separately, so you can get a better look at it. It has a kind of hexagonal shape, which is good ergonomically, and uh it's battery powered, and the batteries come with, and uh it has a tip which you may need to replace uh occasionally. Um and Amazon sells those. So this is the keyboard case with the Kindle in it uh opened. So uh there is uh the back kind of folds up at the bottom, so it rests on its own back, and the front is an ordinary keyboard uh which doesn't need any pairing or anything, it just works uh works very, very well with the uh with the Kindle fire. So you see immediately the difference between other Kindles because uh there are apps, and uh it's meant to be a Kindle crossed with a tablet uh with its uh with apps so that you can you can do lots of other things like uh read the newspaper, watch films, play games, and so on and so forth. So I just wanted to point out uh these three controls at the bottom of the screen. Uh the one in the center brings you back to the home page, the one on the right enables you to swipe up to get rid of to close apps, and the one on the left is uh like just go back to where you were before. Now uh the Kindle Fire has its own app store, and it's more limited than um you know Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. Uh, you can sideload manually the Google Play uh store, but um in all my history of using the Kindle Fire, I found it enough. Because as you have probably realized by now, I uh I have other devices that aren't Kindles. And uh I I don't feel that I need to have any more on my Kindle Fire than what is there already, especially as I mainly use the tablet for watching movies and uh looking at photos, uh listening to music, all those things are on are on the Kindle Fire. And uh you have email also. So, and you see um Microsoft 365, etc. So if you're trying to decide whether you should get the stylus and the so let me just go back down. See the stylus and the keyboard case, bear in mind that uh there are all these third-party apps which you can which are either on the Kindle file when you get it or you can download. And a lot of those uh third-party apps you can um uh write into with the stylus or uh use the Kindle on screen keyboard. But that's a lot more fiddly than having a separate keyboard, a separate physical keyboard uh uh which you can type with. So uh I would recommend the stylus and the keyboard case just for the purpose of uh third-party apps, but they also have their uses in the Kindle app. So to get to your Kindle books, you go up to the um icon for Kindle. Uh hasn't changed in many years, it's a little boy reading a book, and you tap on it and it opens up. So here is I've taken off the stylus and the uh keyboard case because uh most of what I want to say next uh you can actually uh use your finger to do. Okay, so I'm pretending now that you don't yet you don't have them. Okay, so when when you open uh the Kindle app, uh this is what I was looking at uh the Kindle book that I was looking at before I closed the app. So in tip uh it's just like uh any other Kindle app, it takes you to the book that you were uh looking uh looking in. And the main feature, if we're going to talk about annotation, so we've had uh yesterday just uh uh a discussion about the Kindle Scribe, and um of course uh its annotation power is a lot more flexible and powerful than what you'll get with the Kindle Fire. But for some people, maybe the Kindle Fire is enough because there are some annotation tools, and they may be enough for you, especially if you're mainly a reader. So to get to those, uh you uh run either your stylus or your finger along uh text that you want to highlight, and uh this little menu crops up, highlight, look up. So if you just highlight a word, it'll look up um the word. Note, which is what I want to talk about most, copy, pin, share, but it's not share uh in the sense of the Kindle scribe, it's it's more more of uh sharing with um social media and so on, and report. Okay, so I want to focus on note. Okay, so this is the menu, uh a little bit more of a close-up of the menu. So if if I hit note, then I get this nice big white square all of which I can dedicate my note. Okay, and down the bottom it says handwrite here. So what happens is if you want to handwrite, uh you can do it with your finger, but uh I definitely recommend the stylus as uh less frustrating for that. It will turn that handwriting into text inside the note square. Okay, so it's handwriting to text and it works very well. But if you prefer, you can go down uh to this icon and hit that, and you'll get the on-screen keyboard. And so that means that you can type uh your note uh um uh directly uh you can type your note uh using this uh on-screen keyboard uh if you don't want to do the handwrite to text. It's just uh uh straight type in of your note. Now uh when you have the uh keyboard uh case, um what you use is the keyboard uh on that case. Okay, uh it works the same way. Okay. Now there's this thing called writing assist, and this is uh artificial intelligence, and I don't expect this to stay the same. I expect it to get upgraded uh uh by a lot uh over the next uh year or so. But Kindle is very careful uh in uh making its software upgrades available also to the older devices. So don't wait to bio Kindle Fire, don't wait for the next next software update. Uh it'll you get it automatically. So if you hit that, so what's it gonna do? It claims it proofreads, rewrites, emoji, elaborates, can write in a professional tone, can write in a witty tone, can be concise, casual, and summarize the key points. Okay, so back to the note. So um I've I wanted to have something inside the note because otherwise when I when I when I close it, uh you won't see the night uh the note icon that I want to show you. And it automatically saves, and there's a uh an X in the upper right that enables you to exit the note. Okay, but and it will have saved the contents. So there we have it. So it says saved, I've saved for you, and you can close the note by hitting the X. Now when you do that, your note, the placement of your note is marked by uh the sticky note symbol, what uh Kindle users have come to call the um sticky note symbol. And uh in the upper right there's a little menu. Um and the main one that that I want to point out is this thing that looks like a book. Uh if you hit that, then you get your annotations. So you get um where you did the highlighting and you get the uh contents of the notes that you made. Okay, and you can also do a lot of things, uh cosmetic things, so you have font layout themes, and under more you have an incredible number of settings uh to personalize uh uh both the uh Kindle Fire and the stylus if you're using it. Okay, so here we are again. Here is my setup now. Uh, and we have our sticky note uh highlight and our sticky note and the bookmark. Uh and uh this is the stylus on the side of the case, and this is the keyboard case. Okay, so this is what I recommend. I recommend you get all three. Uh, it's not that much that much more expensive to get the stylus and the keyboard case, just because uh it makes things uh more productive and uh easier all round, whether you're in the Kindle app or you're in a third-party app. So this is uh uh so I've closed the uh Kindle uh app, and you see again that it has a very, very nice screen, and you see I have newspapers here, Anchorage Daily News, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and there's also uh you can do email and uh you can look at photos and you can look at prime video. There's lots of stuff that you can do, plus there's there's games if you like that. And it's really uh you so you know, so we've been talking about the color soft, so this is not obviously a replacement uh or uh uh for the colorsoft, which is something affecting the Kindle app. The Kindle app is the usual Kindle app, but what I want to point out is it does have a lot of features, including useful annotation features, even though they aren't of the same level as the Kindle Scribe. If you want to use apps as well as use the Kindle app, you may want to buy this instead of a Kindle Scribe. Uh, but I find that they're so different, the Kindle Scribe and the Kindle Fire, that I've got both. Okay. And that is, I think, all I wanted to say. Now I also got during the uh Black Friday sales, the Little Color Soft uh e-reader, and I've yet to explore it, and probably the next time I see you, I'll talk about that. And so I have uh recent uh Kindle devices that I have are the Kindle Scribe, the Kindle Fire Max 11, and uh the Kindle Color Soft. And I gave you uh in uh my last podcast uh episode uh what I thought about the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and the Kindle Scribe uh without front light. And I told you that I'm gonna wait on those, even though I will provide you with as much information as I can. But this uh Kindle Fire Max 11, so 11 inch, uh, is really a lot of fun, and uh you can uh you have a very satisfactory uh experience uh reading and marking up your Kindle books, even though it's not annotation at the level of the Kindle scribe. But I highly recommend it, and the affiliate link uh my affiliate link to the Kindle FireMax 11 will be in the episode notes. And of course, as an Amazon associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. And I thank you for listening, and uh please subscribe uh subscribe and uh comment and like uh my videos uh so uh you'll you'll know when when I'm on air again, and you can come come over and look at what I have to say. So uh this uh will be both a video episode on YouTube and I'm going to post the audio of it on Buzz Sprout, which uh just does audio podcasts, because I think most of what I said uh uh people don't need uh absolutely need to see the photos. I mean, if you want to see what it looks like, click my affiliate link if you're over in Buzz Sprout, and it will take you uh to Amazon's um uh Kindle Fire Max 11 page, and you can see uh what it looks like. But um anyway, uh so bye for now, and uh next time uh the good old uh Kindle Color Soft uh will be the star, and uh we'll talk about that.