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I will be commenting on Kindle Paperwhite. For novels it is great, for manga you can read but it will be smaller, not so great. PDFs will be shit, as you have to scroll, so academic books should be avoided.

The built in dictionary JP-JP is ok, JP-EN lacks a lot of words. I use this cheap dictionary as a replacement, which improves the experience a lot. As you have a built in dictionary, you can cheat and read things above your level, which has great value compared to books in general.

Japan Amazon store has basically everything you would want, for a price. I registered with my Japan address but my credit card is not from Japan. You have to register your Kindle with a different account from US Amazon, I am not sure if VPNs are needed, as I only used it inside Japan.

Prices are not much different than paperbacks, and can not compete with used books (i.e. bookoff). Outside of Japan it should still be a good deal, as you can avoid shipping costs and have basically instant access to content.

I don't own a tablet because I personally find them to distract me from reading, but I would chose one over Kindle if you aim for Manga instead of novels. You can access the same content in the end, but e-reader screens are a lot more confortable and the device has a single purpose, which in my view is a pro instead of a con.

Several things I'm thinking after reading your post:

First: MIA bases a lot of its work on the assumption that you don't want to learn grammar consciously separately from acquiring it. I think in order to do this you need to acquire the grammar in order, starting from basic particles, conjugations and helper verbs and build up. The alternative is to learn further ahead, allowing you to understand more grammar consciously, with the tradeoff that time spent learning is not spent acquiring. Personally I think there is a balance to be had between the two, as increasing the comprehensibility of your immersion, even a bit, will speed up your acquisition by a lot.

Based on that I think you have a few general options to increase your grammar aquisition:

1. The most MIA compliant option: before active immersion each day, read the Tae Kim article for the next thing you aren't getting. You say you only have the past tense and ください, so maybe try picking a particle or a conjugation you want to focus on. Let's say you want to focus on the negative ない form today. Given that you should read what Tae Kim has to say on the matter here, then go immerse and listen for those negative verbs. In a few hours of basically any Japanese content you will definitely hear quite a few sentences which are just a negative verb, and hundreds which contain one. You should be able to get a feeling for how the conjugation is made and its meaning. If you do that each day for a different point I think you'll get a good idea of the grammar really quick. Even better if you make a sentence card or two for each point.
   
2. Make more grammar based cards from a grammar resource. You could make cards from Tae Kim, or from another resource like the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar. That's what Yoga did and he had great results as we all know.
   
3. Build a stronger mental model of Japanese grammar. This one is the least MIA compliant, and likely to be controversial around here, but if you learn the grammar in a way you understand better on a conscious level, you will comprehend more sentences and therefore acquire language faster. The things you need to think about with regard to doing MIA correctly are: 1. Don't produce based on the grammar you learn. You should only produce based on acquired grammar you know is correct, and 2. don't let active grammar study take away too much of your immersion time. The most important part of MIA is immersion, and if you need to sacrifice something it should be active study, not the other way round.
   
   For number 3, the resources I like for grammar are: Japanese the Manga Way by Wayne Lammers: this gives a great intuitive view of Japanese grammar, with each point backed up by a real example from a real manga. One downside is that it delays by some time plain negative and past forms which I think is really fundamental. Another is Cure Dolly's Youtube channel which is really good if you can get over her weird voice. Also her pronunciation is weird, both in English and Japanese, so make sure you just get the grammar from there and solidify / acquire it through immersion. If you're doing MIA I would avoid all her videos on "organic immersion" too, and stick to her "Japanese from scratch" stuff. With either of these sources I would recommend going through one "lessons" every few days, and making sentence cards from your immersion for each point from the lesson. So the first lesson of Japanese the Manga Way covers basic sentence enders and polite forms, so I would look for sentences which use all of those forms (and from which I know all the vocab), and add them as sentence cards to my deck.

Here you go.

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On the highly unlikely chance that your teacher notices it, just say its a hearing aid.

I'm in the same situation. I saw a few days ago notebooks specifically for writing kanji, but not sure how helpful they are.

They look like this one.

https://www.amazon.com/Genkouyoushi-Practice-Composition-Journal-Notebook/dp/1975773187

This is the book i got:
https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Vocabulary-Words-Language-Proficiency/dp/4872179811/