All-New Kindle Paperwhite(amazon.com) |
All-New Kindle Paperwhite(amazon.com) |
However, I really wish that this newer one had physical buttons on the side for turning the pages, like some of the other Kindle models. I find the touchscreen rather irritating when reading. It's much easier to have buttons on the side that you can press without moving your hand/finger.
If they had included this, I would easily have laid down $120 for an upgrade immediately.
I don't think Amazon appreciates how important buttons are for reading in non-perfect setups. Sure, if you're on your couch or by the swimming pool, you might not care. But try reading on a subway or a bus. Or with gloves on.
I got a chance to try one earlier this month, and compare it to my 3rd gen Kindle Keyboard. The backlight was nice, but I had a few problems with it.
The lack of physical buttons for page changing and the menus drove me nuts. If I'm holding a Paperwhite in my left hand, then to change to a new page I have to move my thumb out far enough, tap, and them bring my thumb "back in" so it doesn't cover the page. I found this to be rather annoying, having the buttons on both sides was so much easier.
The other problem I had was font rendering. The Paperwhite was supposed to have a sharper screen than my 3G, but I couldn't notice a difference in text. I'm guessing it's only obvious on pictures. But I did notice that fonts looked noticeably worse. There were little blobs where it looked like things weren't being kerned correctly. I could compare it directly to the same page on my old Kindle and see the difference. I found it quite distracting.
Other than that they made some small changes I didn't like. The fact that you just have to 'know' where on the screen to touch for certain things was a little odd. I kept accidentally turning the page when I wanted to bring up the menu. I really liked that it could estimate I'd be done with the chapter I was reading in 15 minutes, but I missed having the progress bar available.
I could probably survive the lack of physical buttons, but the font rendering issues really annoyed me. I'll happily keep my Kindle.
To change pages with your left thumb you don't have to move it all the way to the right - you can make a little swipe motion on the left side of the screen and it will skip a page.
I used to have the Kindle Keyboard(Kindle 3) and my god, its resolution was driving me crazy, like it was never sharp. Paperwhite is a lot better in that regard. HOWEVER - fonts get really jaggy after a few page turns, and that's because the paperwhite only refreshes the entire page every 5 or so turns. You can go to settings and tell it to refresh the entire page every turn - then the fonts are always super sharp.
From my personal perspective - I would NEVER trade my paperwhite back for the Kindle 3. I don't mind the lack of physical buttons, and the backlight makes it fantastic.
The paperwhite screen is nice, but whoever signed off on the paperwhite's touch UI exhibited some poor judgement. The onscreen keyboard is fine; the page turning is merely adequate; the book list and web browser scrolling is terrible. (The scrolling uses touch-and-drag, but the software doesn't actually scroll the screen until you release your finger, which makes it very hard to judge what's going on. Touching and dragging requires low latency and a high refresh rate, making it a very bad choice for an e-ink screen.)
A few physical inputs would make this device twice as good. Two buttons and a dpad would do it...
I also wish I could turn the backlight off completely rather than just lower it to the lowest setting.
With the original Kindle, I could comfortably read with every part of me except my face ensconced in warm blankets. A lobster claw like grip through the blanket easily held it in the left hand, and a bonk on the right side either with the right hand, or against my chest, would turn the page.
With the Paperwhite, I have to expose a finger (or bring the Kindle under the blanket) to turn the page.
Also, has anyone noticed that the rendering gets slightly messed up (bolder) if you bring up a prompt, like the built-in dictionary? After it disappears, the area it covers has different font weight from the rest of the page, making me turn back and forth to reset it. Rather annoying.
Otherwise I find I prefer my paper white to my past kindles.
Here's a recent example:
http://boingboing.net/2013/08/24/flash-gordon-1980.html
Add a little color commentary about how you like the Queen soundtrack, a bit about some related context, and then stick in the affiliate link.
Anyone know how software updates tend to apply to older kindles? as a lot of the "Features" seem to be minor software tweaks....
Seriously. It's 2013. Make something that feels and has the space of a full-sized book. It's not that hard. Hell, use it as a loss-leader if you can't make the numbers work.
Wrong.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002GYWHSQ/ref=fs_dx
It isn't Paperwhite, as far as I know, but then again, people are mostly reading novels with them.
And how good is the DX for reading PDFs anyway? They are smaller than a A4/legal page, which I image will mean that things will look small, unless you want to zoom in an out, which makes it un-book-y for me.
A 25% faster CPU is probably fine, however: what this device needs is a tad bit more RAM.
Otherwise, this doesn't make a great improvement. What that "better contrast" means remains to be seen.
As a Kindle hacker, I'm interested in what they did with the bootloader part. The Paperwhite is the first device since the Kindle DX(G) that cannot be put into "USB downloader" mode where you can re-flash the software. Given that even the original software is buggy and prone to get corrupted, that seems to be quite bad design - they can't easily refurbish units. Maybe today's pricing margins don't allow this anyway, though.
As for competing with the Kobo flagships, this is not an impressive new device.
- Only 1.25GB of storage for books. I have many more than this on my K3.
- As others have observed, the lack of mechanical buttons for page flipping.
Oh well. I'll just keep replacing batteries on my K3s as long as I can.
I do agree with the mechanical buttons. I love my PW, but miss the buttons.
BTW, Got Nook HD+ since they are so cheap, loving it!
Personally I find the FreeTime feature to be the most interesting, or maybe amusing. They're gamifying reading, but I suppose parents were doing that already (read X books, get Y).
Now if only they'd fix hyphenation and justification, or make it easy to enable ragged right text I'd be happy. Currently I have to reformat everything in calibre before I read it.
Sony apparently has the reputation for having the best dictionaries, but the PRS-T1 I bought is so buggy it's nearly unusable - if I press a word, it has a one-in-three chance of freezing up for several minutes, and updating the firmware didn't help - so I'm thinking of switching to Kobo or Kindle, but I don't know if they're any better.
If Amazon lowered it to that over the next few days, I would actually consider purchasing the (3+ year-old) DX.
The actual product page still says $239.
Do any HNers have recommendations for large eInk readers suitable for viewing pdfs/textbooks? I mostly read textbooks these days.
It doesn't hurt to try. I've had great luck in the past when I e-mailed him. Just tell him that you're ready to buy it right now for $139.
I like my Kindle DX, but it the resolution is low and it makes it difficult to read magazine PDFs that I load on to it. It's great for reading regular books though.
Will be interesting to see if they've fixed the "uneven backlighting at the bottom" problem on this model. I was very disappointed when I first got my Paperwhite, after all the hyping they did about working to make the backlight even.
I would assume the main point of this model is to silently remove that problem. If not, I can't for the life of me think as to what the benefit is. Sadly until someone gets their hands on one we shan't find out
An e-ink reader is supposed to be easy on your eyes, yet a stark white background honestly creates just as much stress as reading against a screen. And High-Contrast mode is even worse for most people.
The paperwhite is amazingly readable, and not at all comparable to a computer screen white.
I not buying another one. whole point of having light ereader is to use it lightly, without cover.
It's sad that that's impressive, but that's where embedded software is today.
> HOWEVER - fonts get really jaggy after a few page turns, and that's because the paperwhite only refreshes the entire page every 5 or so turns. You can go to settings and tell it to refresh the entire page every turn - then the fonts are always super sharp.
I know there is an option for that, but I didn't think to give it a try. Maybe that was the problem. I was just amazed that out of the box the font rendering was noticeably worse than a model that was at least 2 years older.