Amazon Kindle PaperWhite - Unboxing & Review

The New Amazon Kindle: A Review

HD and since this is the ad support, you'll also get these on the launch screen so if you lock the Kindle, you'll always have a full-screen ad to wake up the Kindle. You'll need to hit the power button again and swipe the screen to get to the home screen at the top of the screen. You'll find your status bar which gives you the time Wi-Fi connection status and battery indicator. To the left, you'll see the notifications such as download status or the name of your Kindle.

The main menu bar on the home screen includes the home button, back button, lighting controls, shopping cart, and search function along with a button for additional features. The lighting controls are perhaps the biggest new feature here. The lighting source is actually front-lit, meaning that there is a layer over the ink screen which is side-lit by LEDs diffusing the light evenly over the screen. Amazon expects users to have this on at all times because it improves readability under all lighting conditions. Overall, the effect looks very good with more even light distribution than the Nook Simple Touch, which tends to wash out darker texts.

The Kindle Store lets you search the store or browse category so you can purchase books directly on your device. This includes content such as periodicals and comic books. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can also borrow books for free. This is indicated by the Amazon Prime icon on the book listing. If we open the book, we can see it picks up where we left off on our other Kindle devices or apps. You can advance a page just by tapping right or left. We can tap the top of the screen to get to additional options such as font controls with size options, line spacing, and margins.

Amazon says that the fonts on the new Kindle have been specifically designed for the higher resolution screen. Since this is a touchscreen, you can also pinch in and out to change font sizes. If we tap and hold the word, you have several options including a dictionary definition. You can also highlight text or add a note which you can quickly access later by going to the additional options button in the menu.

X-ray is an Amazon-exclusive feature which debuted a year ago. Which indexes the entire book by important names or locations. This allows you to quickly navigate to sections of the book just by selecting a term from the listing predefined by Amazon. You also get a timeline view of exactly where each of those terms appears. Tapping on them lets you see a preview of the passage that each term appears in and you can tap on any one of them to get to the page.

Sharing works with your Twitter and Facebook accounts so you can post directly to those accounts with a message and Amazon will provide a link to the book. Another new feature is a reading progress indicator in the lower left corner which will estimate how much time you have left before you're done reading the current chapter or the entire book. And you can toggle that just by tapping on it.

Go-to is pretty self-explanatory. Let you jump to a chapter or you can specify a page number or location. Search also lets you search a term in the book or you can change the search area in the drop-down menu. This includes things like search your items, search the Kindle Store, dictionary, or Wikipedia.

We also have a web browser here which Amazon continues to call experimental. Like any touchscreen browser, you can pinch to zoom but like all screens, the refresh rate is too slow to be useful. However, under menu options, you do have the article bone which will strip out the images and format the text for the screen size so you can read just the text like you would any other in the book.

Comparing this to the existing Kindle Touch, the design is very similar but simpler and thinner with a matte finish back panel. The home button is now gone as is the headphone jack and the speaker grills for audio. You also have the deeply recessed screen on the Amazon Touch or the Kindle Touch versus the Paperwhite which makes the paperwhite feel thinner and smoother.

The touch screen feels about the same on both devices so the change in technology doesn't really change performance. However, the Paperwhite is noticeably faster. So if we place them side-by-side and do a test you can see that the Paperwhite does have a significant edge on the Touch. Overall, the Paperwhite is the Kindle I've been waiting for. It's the first one to get both the hardware and software right and I think it leads all others in design and functionality especially around the lighting technology.

Now combine that with the low price and enormous and platform-agnostic Amazon ecosystem, and I think you have an unbeatable e-reader.