Amazon Kindle Paperwhite review

You could be forgiven for wondering how Amazon could improve on its already excellent range of ebook readers. The Kindle Paperwhite is its answer: initially only launched in the US, the Paperwhite is now available to UK consumers, and a good thing too.

As with the Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, the key selling point of the Paperwhite is a built-in light that casts the screen in a soft, white glow. Unlike an LCD-based tablet such as the Kindle Fire HD, devices with E Ink screens require ambient light in order to make them legible.

The light embedded in the Paperwhite’s top bezel means it can be read in bed and in other dimly lit rooms without the need for a lamp. Turned up to maximum brightness, it also gives the page a whiter, more paper-like look in broad daylight.

The light fantastic

The Paperwhite’s light comes in the form of four small LEDs embedded in the top bezel of the device. These shine down through an anti-glare layer in front of the screen and the light they cast is remarkably even. We do like the Nook, but its eight LEDs create a slightly patchier look; the Kindle, at first glance, doesn’t even look lit as the light is so consistently spread across its surface. A closer look reveals some unevenness along the screen’s bottom edge, but after a little while reading it’s easy to ignore.

Put the Nook and the Paperwhite side by side and it’s also clear the Kindle is slightly brighter at its maximum setting, and that text is blacker. Examine characters with a really critical eye, and you may also be able to discern ever-so-slightly crisper text edges, which is down to a higher resolution 758 x 1,024 display.

Indeed, with its light turned up, this Kindle is the closest yet to mimicking print on a page, and Amazon is even quoting impressive-sounding battery life. It says the Paperwhite will last eight weeks with the light on if you read for 30 minutes a day, and it’s impossible to turn the light completely off. Slide your finger down the scale to 0, and there’s still a faint glow, although only visible in the darkest of rooms.

The claims should be taken with a reasonable pinch of salt, though: this is with Wi-Fi off and the light set to level 10 out of 24 (around 40% brightness) – that isn’t bright enough to affect contrast in a sunlit room.

Design and features

It isn’t all about resolution and the light, though. The Paperwhite is the first UK model since the Kindle keyboard to offer a 3G model. It’s £60 more expensive, but offers free 3G or GPRS connectivity across most of Europe, the US and many other countries across the world. You can check out the areas covered using wireless coverage map on the Amazon website.

There’s another, less exciting new feature on offer: the touchscreen has made the move from optical to capacitive technology. From a usability perspective, this doesn’t appear to have any impact whatsoever. The screen is as responsive to the touch as the E Ink technology allows it to be – and works no better than the old Kindle Touch. However, in terms of design, it does allow the bezel to sit closer to the surface of the display, with a far less noticeable lip.

This contributes to a device that’s almost as slim as the non-touch, standard Kindle, measuring 9.2mm from the front of the bezel to the rear of the case. It’s compact enough to cradle in one hand, with a width of 116.5mm, and weight isn’t a problem either. The Wi-Fi Kindle Paperwhite tips the scales at 213g and the 3G one a little more at 222g.

Visually, there isn’t much to it: a plain black border surrounds the screen, while a soft-touch plastic coats the rear and wraps around the edges. Other than the etched Kindle logo on the back, the power button and micro-USB socket on the bottom edge and the printed Kindle logo beneath the screen on the front it’s pretty plain. Amazon has even removed the home button, which initially left us scrabbling around, wondering how to get back to the homescreen.

The button is to be found on a new navigation bar that’s permanently resident on the home and store screens, and appears in reading mode when the top area of the screen is tapped. As well as a home button, the bar is where you’ll find a back button, plus shortcuts to the Store, Search and Settings menu.

Once you get used to that, there are other aspects of the user interface that need adjusting to. Some of these are positive changes. The onscreen keyboard, for instance, now feels more spacious, making keyword searches and taking notes a little easier. Your books and other publications are split between Cloud and Device views, echoing the Kindle Fire’s approach to media management. The main homescreen now displays a cover thumbnail view by default, with recent books in the top half of the screen, and suggestions for what to read next running along the bottom of the screen.

If we were in the US, at this point we’d spend at least a paragraph moaning about the ads. Luckily, the UK version of the Paperwhite has none. Perhaps having to remove this “feature” is what was behind the delay in bringing the device to the UK. Whatever, it’s good to know UK users won’t be battered with ads every time they switch the device on.

Reading

The browsing and buying experience is certainly better for the changes to the user interface, but you’ll spend more time in reading view, and this also benefits from some additions. Aside from that new navigation bar, there’s a new way of displaying your reading progress. At the bottom of the page, instead of displaying your progress by “location” or pages read, the Paperwhite tells you how much time you’re likely to take to read the remainder of the book or chapter. You can switch back to location if you wish.

Amazon has also included a selection of new fonts. Where previously there were three options for changing the typeface – regular, condensed and sans serif – the Paperwhite has six options: Baskerville, Caecilia, Caecilia Condensed, Futura, Helvetica and Palatino. Line spacing, margins, and size options remain the same as before.

There’s still X-Ray from the previous generation of Kindles, a feature that allows you jump to pages where certain characters and places are mentioned, although only in titles that have implemented the feature.

And performance isn’t much different either. By default, the new Kindle does a full page refresh once every six page turns, taking 0.8 seconds each, with partial refreshes in between taking 0.6 seconds. Those partial refreshes do leave a slight ghosting on blank parts of the screen, but you can force it to refresh fully every page turn, something we found we preferred.

The Paperwhite will open AZW3, AZW, TXT and PDF, plus non-DRM MOBI and PRC files, natively without conversion. You can also email a selection of other formats and have them converted and delivered to the reader wirelessly. There’s no support for any kind of EPUB file, however, so unless you resort to illegal methods there’s no way of loading on ebooks from third-party stores, or the local library lending service available in many local authorities. Handling of PDF files remains middling at best, with no tools to reflow text or follow columns. You’re left to zoom and pan manually for the best reading experience.

However, the huge selection in Amazon’s Kindle store will render that consideration a minor one for most users. The news that £49-per-year Amazon Prime customers will also get to “borrow” one book per month for free, with “no due dates” is welcome too. It remains to be seen how broad the selection of titles is and how well it works, as the official launch date has yet to be confirmed.

Verdict

The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite doesn’t need Amazon Prime to establish itself as the market-leading ebook reader, though. It will be love at first sight for anyone who claps eyes on one, for one reason and one reason alone: that front light.

Its exceedingly even glow puts it significantly ahead of the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, and the slender frame, higher-resolution screen and availability of a 3G version stretches out that lead even further. Unless the upcoming Kobo Glo, which also has a built-in light, can make significant gains, the Paperwhite will be this and next year’s must-have ebook reader.

Screen
Screen size	6.0in
Resolution	758 x 1024
Colour screen	no
Touchscreen	yes
eBook screen-refresh time	0.6 seconds
Battery
Integrated memory	2.0GB
Memory-card type	N/A
Dimensions
Dimensions	116.5 x 9.2 x 169mm (WDH)
Weight	213g
File format support
Plain text	yes
HTML	no
RTF	no
PDF	yes
EPUB	no
BBeB	no
AZW	yes
Microsoft Word	no