Review: Amazon Kindle Paperwhite really shines
Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite is a significant upgrade to Amazon’s flagship Kindle e-reader. With the inclusion of a light, a high-resolution display, and dramatically updated software, the $119 Kindle Paperwhite catches up to the competition in some ways and exceeds it in others. It’s the first e-reader with both the higher-resolution display and a built-in light, and the Paperwhite proves that those two features make for a compelling combination.
Leave a light on
AmazonWith its light on, the Kindle Paperwhite’s display looks closer to paper.
The big news about the Kindle Paperwhite is suggested by its name: It’s got a built-in light that, when on at maximum brightness, makes the Kindle’s display appear closer to white than the usual tinted, newspaper-gray color that’s typical of E Ink’s electrophoretic ink screens (including this one when the light is off). This is the first “traditional” Kindle to come with its own light—previously you’d need to clip on a separate reading light or use a case with a light built into it if you wanted to read in the dark.
The Paperwhite lights its surface via four embedded LEDs, which channel their light into a clear sheet of material that acts as a light guide, diffusing the light across the entire display. The approach is similar to what Barnes & Noble did with its Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight, but Amazon’s software implementation adjusts the hue of the lighting, allowing the page to appear more white as the light is bumped up higher along its adjustable 24 levels of brightness.
The Paperwhite’s light is brighter and more evenly distributed than the one on the Nook with Glowlight, and the LEDs are not as obvious as on the Nook. I did notice some shadowing along the very bottom of the display, which Amazon said was “by design at the bottom of the screen in the margin of the page where text is not present.”
The Paperwhite offers 24 levels of brightness, but reading is generally satisfactory at non-maximum brightness.
It didn’t take me very long to discover that I preferred to use the Paperwhite with the light on. Even in daylight, the light brightens the background, making the text appear bolder and noticeably improving contrast. But even in a darkened room, I didn’t feel the need to crank the brightness up all the way. Most of the time I left it at roughly half brightness, a setting of 12 or 13 on the device’s 24-point scale. The only time I didn’t feel the need to use the light was when I had a reading lamp shining directly on the Paperwhite’s screen.
I haven’t been using the Paperwhite long enough to vet Amazon’s battery life claims. Amazon’s battery life estimates of 8 weeks of use (30 minutes per day) with the light on at all times is based on a brightness level of 10, slightly below the level I found most comfortable.
A high-resolution display
The Kindle Paperwhite’s E Ink display is a big upgrade from past Kindles. It’s a 768-by-1024-pixel 6-inch display with a resolution of 212 pixels per inch (ppi), meaning this display has 62 percent more pixels than last year’s Kindle (or the current Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight). Amazon isn’t the first to market with this high-resolution display; iRiver first used it in its Story HD e-reader last year.
The higher-resolution display, coupled with Kindle Paperwhite’s careful attention to font rendering, results in text that’s easy on the eyes. Fonts looked smoother than on last year’s Kindle Touch, and there are more of them—seven in total, four more than on the Touch. That’s much more competitive, too: The Nook Simple Touch has six fonts, and both the Kobo Touch eReader and the Sony Reader offer seven.
As on previous Kindles, the Kindle Paperwhite has eight font sizes, including one of the largest I’ve seen on any e-reader. You can adjust line spacing and margins, with three options apiece.
The Kindle Paperwhite offers a major upgrade from the Kindle Touch when it comes to its touchscreen technology. The Kindle Touch used infrared sensor technology, which required an annoyingly deep recess between its outer edges and its display. That’s gone with the Paperwhite, which is the first e-reader to use the capacitive-touch technology we’ve all become accustomed to on smartphones and tablets.
I found the Paperwhite’s screen to be highly responsive to my touch, and I noticed that its new matte display surface actually made it feel more like paper than other readers I’ve used.
But in the end, it’s all about the light. When the Paperwhite’s light is turned off, it’s a bit harder to notice all the other improvements in the display when compared to the Kindle Touch. Amazon says the Paperwhite has 25 percent better contrast, but the company doesn’t specify what it did to bring about that improvement. Text does look blacker, but some of that is probably due to the light and contrast with the Paperwhite’s black bezel. (Although I found that the device’s bezel and soft-touch back are surprisingly prone to attracting fingerprints.)
So while it’s safe to say that the upgraded screen resolution, new fonts, and faster page turns make this Kindle stand out compared to its predecessors, it’s really the Paperwhite’s light that makes the entire product shine.
Paperwhite’s design panache
Amazon
Physically, the new Kindle Paperwhite shares many similarities with the Kindle Touch: The two e-readers weigh the same, at 7.5 ounces (or 0.47 pounds), and each share the same dimensions, differentiated by a mere tenth of an inch in height and width, and a rounding error in depth. Nook with Glowlight is very close in weight, at 6.95 ounces (or 0.43 pounds).
I found the Paperwhite appealing to hold in one hand; and the rounded edges helped it stay comfortably in hand.
As before, you get 2GB of storage on-board the Kindle Paperwhite. There’s no microSD card slot, as found on competing e-readers. And the Kindle Paperwhite is missing the the audio jack found on last year’s Kindle Touch, so look elsewhere if you want audiobook or text-to-speech support.
When you power on the Kindle Paperwhite, you’ll see Amazon’s dramatic and overdue overhaul of its Kindle e-reader home screen, the first such significant redesign in years. The snappy home screen finally catches up to the more visual presentations found in its competitors, though Amazon’s penchant for sending you directly to its retail store comes through clearly in this redesign.
Along the top of the display sits your basic navigation bar with buttons for home, back, light, and Kindle store access, plus a search bar a and context-sensitive menu drop down. Below that, the home screen displays three items (sorted by your choice of recent, title, author, or collections; and segmented by your choice of all items, books, periodicals, documents, or active content). The covers of items are displayed by default, rather than a simple text-based list. The bottom half of the home screen shows a scrollable carousel of store content that leads lead you right into the store with a single tap. At the bottom is the current “special offer” advertisement, unless you pay to turn it off.
The new Kindle Paperwhite home screen.
The Paperwhite’s menu items shift contextually. When reading a book, you can jump directly to an author, shift to landscape mode, sync to the furthest page read elsewhere, add a bookmark, or view notes and markings.
For all the changes made to Kindle’s software, I still don’t like that most in-book navigation is handled at the top of the screen, instead of from the bottom, as on competing e-readers. At least Amazon has moved a bunch of actions—such as changing fonts, going to a specific location, accessing the X-Ray feature for dissecting and parsing books, or sharing content via social media—from the bottom of the screen to the top; but you still have to move your hand to the top of the screen just to activate the on-screen menus. It’s better than before, but could be better still.
Navigation on the Kindle remains a bit different from the competition as well. As with the Kindle Touch, the top inch or so of the 6-inch display is reserved for accessing those menus and toolbar with a single tap. Below that, Amazon divides the screen into regions: A half-inch-wide strip running the length of the left-hand side that you can tap to return to the previous page, and a larger area to the right of that strip that’s reserved for advancing to the next page. This means your finger doesn’t need to be precisely aligned on the right-hand edge in order for you to turn pages. It’s an arrangement that works well, and is amenable to taps from either hand.
Amazon’s new Time to Read feature, which gauges your reading speed and then estimates how long it will take you to read or complete a given chapter, appears as a pop-up along the bottom of a page. It’s a nifty idea for a feature, but I found its initial estimates to be wildly inaccurate. Maybe it just needs more time to get to know me better.
In-book navigation remains a sticking point, too. You first tap the main menu, then Go To, and then select from cover, beginning, end, or page/location. And Kindle Paperwhite lacks a slider to make it simple to see where you are in a book at a glance, as some of its competitors do.
Like its predecessors, the Kindle Paperwhite won’t display books in the ePub file format, but handles Amazon’s format, plus text, PDF, unprotected Mobi, and PRC; and the device can convert files saved in some other formats, such as HTML and DOCX, if you email the files to your Kindle. (If you’ve got lots of ePub-formatted books, you can use a free tool such as Calibre to convert them to Mobi format.)
Finally, Amazon remains the only e-reader manufacturer to still offer a 3G version. You can use the 3G service globally at no additional charge for downloading books, which makes the $179 Kindle Paperwhite 3G a great choice for frequent travelers, or for anyone who has need of such connectivity convenience. As with the Wi-Fi model, factor in additional $20 if you want to ditch the ads.
Bottom line
With the Kindle Paperwhite’s integrated illumination and dramatic software redesign, Amazon has improved the everyday usage experience of its top-tier Kindle in a meaningful way. While the non-touch Kindle is now available at a bargain price at $69, the $119 Kindle Paperwhite offers greater flexibility and easier navigation that you’ll appreciate in your day-to-day use. If you’re already committed to the Kindle ecosystem, this is a worthy upgrade. And if you’re new to e-readers, the Paperwhite is worthy competitor to Barnes & Noble’s $119 Simple Touch with Glowlight.
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