Amazon’s latest Kindle is a stable replace: there’s lastly a constructed-in gentle, it has help for Bluetooth headphones so you’ll be able to take heed to audiobooks, and it even has a barely tweaked design that smooths out the corners and makes it extra snug to carry. However, Amazon’s Kindle doesn’t stay in a vacuum. In a world the place the far superior Kindle Paperwhite exists, the brand new Kindle isn’t adequate to justify the small price difference.
The brand new Kindle begins at $89.99, whereas the latest Paperwhite starts at $129.99. I have spent a previous couple of days studying on the brand new Kindle, and it’s been reasonably irritating expertise. Not as a result of the display is bad, per se, however as a result of I’ve gotten used to studying on higher screens.
To place that distinction in one other technological perspective, the variations in pixel density between the Kindle and the Paperwhite is much like that between the iPhone 3GS (163 ppi) and the iPhone 4 (326 ppi). Nobody who used an iPhone 4 was clamoring to get a 3GS again, and the soar between what textual content seems to be like on a Paperwhite and an everyday Kindle is as vital.
When you have seen what textual content seems like on a Paperwhite (and different high-resolution displays, like those in virtually every phone and most popular laptops), it’s unimaginable to return, even when it’s to save $40. There’s a purpose why practically every single e-reader out there, from Amazon and opponents like Kobo, offer larger-resolution displays: the one factor you’ll ever do on a Kindle is read text. It’s desk stakes for the class, and it’s disappointing to see that Amazon continues to be providing the same previous panel within the 2019 model when elements which might be practically twice nearly as good can be found.
The new Kindle doesn’t measure as much as the Paperwhite in different respects as nicely: the display screen remains to be recessed as an alternative of flush with the entrance of the panel, it’s not waterproof, it has only 4GB of storage, and there are only 4 LEDs within the lighting system (as a substitute of the five-LED setup on the Paperwhite). The brand new Paperwhite would already be the price the additional $40 only for the display alone, however, add in the remaining, and there’s just about no motive even to contemplate the base model.