For the first time ever we have a guest post on Double Usefulness. My good friend Darren McGuicken kindly agreed to write a review of his brand-new-out-of-the-box Kindle Paperwhite. In my opinion what follows is a very helpful guide to what the new Kindle offers and how it compares with previous manifestations. Thanks a million Darren!
Many of the latest reviews of e-ink devices, contrary to their focus back when the technology was new and more obviously entirely magical, tend to spend their time on the differentiation between e-readers and tablets. The conclusions usually suggest that yes, an e-ink display is a nice thing in general and probably easier on the eyes than something backlit, but that if you want games, film, or other media as well (implication: and you’d be mad not to) then it’s still worth paying the extra (implication: and potentially not much extra) and going for a ‘full tablet’, as though that was secretly your goal all along.
This review is similarly biased, and assumes that you are already convinced of the merits of e-ink and are more interested in whether this particular e-ink based device is for you or a worthy upgrade if you already possess one.
My own Paperwhite arrived from the US Amazon store (via
these nice people, following
this handy process) the week before it was announced as a pre-order on the UK Amazon store and as of this review I’ve had exactly seven days to play with it.
As an aside for those wondering if a US order is still worthwhile, and taking into account the final customs duty, US sales tax, delivery costs etc. I incurred, a US-ordered Kindle plus official leather cover worked out no cheaper overall than would the same items ordered from the UK today. Additionally, my version comes with ‘
Special Offers’, ads, while the standard UK version does not.
Any actually useful offers you might see will be US-only anyway and not available in the UK if clicked-through.
I was upgrading from a first generation
Barnes & Noble Nook (again a US order since it never materialised in the UK, unlike
the latest models) which was both lovely and loved and had some real genre-busting features.
The most impressive of which was how it got around the lack of a touch-screen interface for its e-ink display by introducing a swipeable and prodable LCD strip below the e-ink which configured itself into a set of context-aware buttons depending on whether you were reading a book, viewing the homescreen, or making use of an ‘app’ such as the in-built web browser or others available from third parties.
This was an intuitive and inventive solution to a problem which other contemporary e-readers either had to solve using
physical keyboards or eventually, much later, with low-resolution and high-sensitivity
infra-red.
The Nook approach seemed like something from a much more advanced device in comparison but it did significantly impact battery life and its software was always a little unstable, with reboots and crashes coming fairly frequently.
The actual e-ink display on the Nook was great. All e-ink was and is awe-inspiring, even to the tech geeks amongst, maybe especially to us, since we’re used to the usual slight-disappointment that new technology can bring (it never really looks like it does on TV, not in real life, not when used by pesky humans). e-Ink, on the other hand, really was as new and different as it claimed. The static-screen effect, the ‘that’s just a sticker, peel it off and turn the thing on so I can see what it actually looks like’ effect, was startling at the time.
One downside of e-ink for both the Nook and its competitors was a very grey overall tinge to the display, something that continues with many current devices, which produced an overall image maybe a bit too dull when used indoors or away from a good light source. That was really just the flipside of its main benefit, since in bright sunlight it excelled, and if needing a lamp to read indoors when it got darker was its failure then it was still exactly the same experience as owning a real book.
The Nook also made up for whatever resolution failings it may have had (even modern implementations of e-ink aren’t particularly
high DPI) through good use of font selection and presentation.
The
Amasis font in particular gave a very nice book-like typeface which imparted a quality feel to the ‘print’ which other devices of its era didn’t necessarily care about, using e-ink optimised generic serif and sans-serif fonts that still looked quite computerlike.
A further aside: low resolution e-ink devices just don’t seem to look as bad as low-resolution LCD. Some combination of the physical properties of e-ink screens and the much higher contrast of backlit LCD mean that ‘jaggies’ are much more apparent and much more intrusive on the latter.
What does any of this have to do with the Kindle? Well, the Nook is my only real long-term experience of e-readers and in many ways as an instance of their kind it was ahead of its time. The new Kindle is the first all-in-one package e-reader that seems to be genuinely worth an upgrade in comparison.
Why?
Like the Nook, the interface on the new Kindle is now responsive enough that it can be tweaked depending on context, and in this implementation it’ll do so on the main e-ink screen instead of on a separate, dedicated LCD strip. So the home screen now shows a handy cover view of your books, which makes swiping through your archive in search of something much quicker than having to parse dense lists of full-text titles.
Like the Nook, the touchscreen of that new interface is very responsive, finally making use of a true capacitative layer, as would a tablet. It can also happily therefore only be triggered by your fingers and not by random detritus falling on it, unlike an infra-red solution. The responsiveness of the touchscreen is far superior to anything else I’ve seen on similar devices, acting exactly as it would on your smartphone or tablet, and when combined with the increasing use of only partial screen wipes or page fades (until enough e-ink debris builds up) gives a much more eye-friendly overall effect than when earlier devices used full wipes for each screen transition. Transition speeds themselves don’t seem to be significantly improved over the prior generation of Kindle.
Like the Nook, there are a selection of fonts available, including the excellent
Baskerville, a font often used in honest-to-goodness Real Pulp™ devices.
As the resolution increases in e-readers there is less of a dependency on specially crafted fonts to hide the failings of the display and more options become available to make your experience as booklike as possible.
Other reviewers don’t necessarily believe that the new suite of fonts are optimised enough for the display, that the e-ink originated fonts look better than the perhaps ‘too thin for the resolution’ implementations of the other fonts on offer which still show the limits of the screen.
From my own experience, and at ten chapters into the Silmarillion with the font set to a small sized Baskerville, I think the overall look is great, and now much closer to an actual paperback in the hand.
Unlike the Nook… the new Kindle has a couple of additional interesting tricks.
The lighting. You already know about the
Paperwhite effect, and I can confirm that it really does add a clarity and a contrast to the screen in daylight conditions which, when played with and adjusted for the specific ambient light, can produce a very papery look to the screen.
Set alongside an actual paper book’s page you can see that it has much the same effect on the eyes.
In darkness, the brightness can be reduced right down to something that’s easy enough to look at, while keeping the text legible, to allow you to keep reading without needing a lamp.
As Amazon themselves are now
trying to make clear though, the lighting effect is not completely even across the bottom of the screen, the light itself clearly emitting from five discrete points along the bottom edge, giving a ‘searchlight’ type effect pointing up onto the screen.
The darker the conditions, the more obvious this becomes.
I don’t find that this is really noticeable when reading, or when the light is being used to provide greater contrast rather than as the sole or primary source of illumination, but it will irritate some people and is definitely worth investigating before you run out and buy one.
In darkness the ‘frontlit’ effect is also a little more odd looking, vaguely ghostly. More like the effect given by glow-in-the-dark paint, albeit at a much higher potential brightness, or as though there is a light source somewhere in the room which is reflecting off the page, no matter how you orient it.
The light is also always turned on when the device is active, even when set to its lowest level, which wouldn’t ordinarily be visible except in darkness. It’s only truly turned off when the device is locked.
I’ve only charged the device once since its arrival and even after a week of mostly evening reading I’m still on more than three quarters of a charge, so battery impact doesn’t yet seem to be an issue as a result.
‘X-Ray’ is also a new and entirely welcome feature, in which concepts or characters or places are called out in an overlay which can be accessed from the new top-menu. Each entry is given a blurb (coming from Wikipedia and similar sources), potentially explaining who a given character is, any important physical characteristics, along with a timeline showing their appearances in the book as well as a list of every instance in which that character, place or concept is mentioned.
This, like the in-built dictionary available in previous generations, keeps you much closer to the text you’re reading if you need to look something up, rather than having you hop back and forward in the same book, or to leave one book for another, or even to jump into a separate web browser and away from the book entirely.
The software on the device also seems robust in a way that the Nook was not. Although this again is probably no strangeness to those already used to more modern devices.
e-Readers will never have the same tactility as an actual tree-innards book, something with good quality paper, with that smell, with that texture… However those are features for the fetishist, not the reader. Those of us who love books will and should continue to buy books. Those of us who love to read are well served by the portability and accessibility to content that an e-reader brings, even if it’s as an addition to books which are collected physically as a luxury. The Kindle Paperwhite is the best e-ink based reader that I’ve seen.
The screen is great, the touch interface is great, and all the differences and additional features are definitely for the better, but I don’t believe that if you already have a recent e-reader that the difference is so great that you should trade it in for this one.
When or if that device breaks or if you’re already a couple of generations behind, or looking for something which better integrates with Amazon and your existing cloud of purchases (or access to the
Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, finally available internationally), then this is a fantastic device and in my opinion well worth the money.
