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  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.

Enlarge / Whip it good, HBO Max. (credit: Aurich Lawson / HBO Max )

As 2020 draws to a close, HBO Max's 2020 stumble into the streaming-video fray has begun smoothing out , and the subscription service will soon seal its biggest North American gap: a spot on the Roku marketplace.

Starting tomorrow, December 17, North American Roku owners will finally be able to download and access the HBO Max app, as confirmed by a joint statement by Roku and WarnerMedia , the entertainment conglomerate that's wholly owned by AT&T. The official statement didn't mention what previously prevented owners of Roku set-top boxes and smart TVs from accessing the $14.99/mo subscription service, though it did acknowledge a new "agreement" between the companies—which was likely a financial one.

And that agreement was likely significant, owing to the whopping 100 million-plus users currently hooked into the Roku ecosystem. It follows a November move by WarnerMedia to get HBO Max onto Amazon Fire streaming-video devices . That's not all—PlayStation 5 users can add HBO Max to that console's "media" tab starting today, as well.

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