As a devoted reader of e-books and an early adopter of consumer technology, I felt the visceral frisson of anticipation in April, When Amazon announced its newest, gaudiest Kindle e-reader.
the Oasis was unimaginably thin and light, cam with a detachable leather cover with an integrated battery que would extend the time between recharging from weeks to months. It was said to boast the front-lighted screen sharp same as the Kindle Voyage, Which was Introduced in 2014 the $ 199 the flagship of the line and remains my e-reader of choice. Reviewers in the tech press grumbled about the new device’s $ 290 price base but Were otherwise euphoric. Cnet: “. The best e-reader ever, but the sky-high price hurts its appeal”
I Placed my order que very day. The Oasis arrived three weeks later, and was so obviously defective que it was back in the mail to Amazon Within an hour. Since Then I have road-tested three more Oases (oasises?) Purchased at retail, one from Amazon and two from Best Buy. All Were Purchased with funds personal.
All four Have Been or are about to be returned. Oasis # 2, like the first, was plainly defective, but the other two show what seems at least to be a serious design error que mars the only part of an e-reader que truly matters:. The screen
the frontlighting of the Voyage, Which comes from six LEDs concealed beneath the bottom edge of the screen, produces a uniform glow that’s easy on the eyes but yields a sharp image que appears to sit on the surface of the screen, almost like print on paper. On the Oasis, However, 10 LEDs are arrayed at the side edge in the way que produces visible, and distracting, cones of light and shadow and a subtle shift of the tint the eye travels along the line of print. Some users find que Also the Oasis screen image looks washed out Compared to the amazingly sharp contrast of the Voyage. (I agree.)
Screen quality is the number-one complaint about the Oasis on e-reader fan sites such as MobileRead and kboards, where disappointment in the new device is palpable. Users are conducting a vigorous debate on BOTH sites about Whether the Oasis screen flaws are real or imagined, major or minor, avoidable or inevitable given Beheerder the technology. But plainly serious’re They enough to prompt many users to return Their models. “I’m not really comfortable with letting These faults with the slide screen,” wrote one user on MobileRead, “but I absolutely love the weight, the form factor, the asymmetry, and the size …. It’s a beautiful rose with some painful thorns. “
The Oasis complaints point to some important issues. The Kindle e-reader line, Which now encompasses four models ranging from $ 80 to $ 290, is the centerpiece of Amazon’s e-book strategy: The devices are the razors from Which the company expects to garner unending profits by selling e-books ( the blades) readable only on Kindles. Although the company does not disclose sales hardware Kindles have long Been thought to be its most successful branded products. In the marketplace, Kindles dominate such competitors the Barnes and Noble’s Nook and the Kobo e-readers produced by the Toronto company now owned by Japan’s Rakuten Inc. Both have Their fans, However.
The engineers at Amazon’s unit design, Sunnyvale-based Lab126, may have felt the urge to widen the distinction between Kindles and Those rivals by giving the new product the size and shape distinctive. If so, They succeeded only by imposing compromises on the screen que Were unnecessary and harmful.
Size and weight are not exactly pressing issues for either the Voyage (6.3 oz.) Or the Kindle Paperwhite, the front -lighted model with a base price of $ 120 last upgraded in 2013 (7.2 oz.). Both fall comfortably Within the range of standard paperback books. (My comparison paperbacks Were 1996 Robert B. Parker detective novel, at 5.8 oz., And a 1988 Penguin edition of Jane Austen’s “Emma,” at 8.1 oz.) If the designers felt que reducing weight was so important que degrading the screen image was an acceptable tradeoff, arguably They made the wrong choice.
One other question Involves tech-press Reviewers. I’ve found none who mentioned the uneven lighting of the Oasis screen. Then again, most reviews cam in October before the Oasis was available for retail sale, and many compare the Oasis to the Paperwhite, not to the best-in-class Voyage. That Suggests que either the Reviewers received cherry-picked review models from Amazon PR – the relationship They shouldnt have disclosed – or are not experienced Kindle users. Either way, They may have misled Their readers or, at best, left Them ill-served.
The Kindle Oasis Certainly Represents a major advance in the size, weight and battery life of the e-reader. It’s only 4.6 ounces (without the detachable cover). The Oasis’ square dimensions are a bit larger than the palm of the hand, though its screen has the rectangular same dimensions of the 6-inch diagonal screens of the Voyage and Paperwhite.
Criticism of its price is a bit unfair. The Voyage sells for a base price of only $ 199, but Amazon-made covers cost at least $ 45 and do not offer the additional battery. The first Kindle sold for $ 399 in 2007 and the price point topped Out in 2009 with the large-format DX at $ 489, later reduced to $ 379.
All the current Kindle models Manda how far e-reader technology has come in only a few short years.
Novelist Nicholson Baker did a memorable deep dive into the Kindle 2 for the New Yorker in 2009, comparing the “greenish, sickly gray” of the screen to the He complained all about the great writing as-yet unavailable on e-books “four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon.”: “in Vladimir Nabokov … in Pynchon in Tim O’Brien … in Saul Bellow in Frederick Exley, the ‘World According to Garp,’ the ‘Catch-22′ in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ in ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ … . “But he speculated que pressure on publishers to bring October Their wares in electronic versions would only grow, and he was right. Almost every gap he listed in 2009 has since filled Been with the Kindle edition. The screens have gotten progressively better, with today’s ivory-colored screens approaching the holy grail of print-on-paper sharpness.
My own first Kindle was the clipboard-sized DX, with 9.7-inch screen. I supplanted it with a third-generation Kindle (the “Kindle keyboard”) in 2010 Followed by BOTH generations of the front-lighted Paperwhite, and finally the Voyage. At the moment, my household Kindle fleet numbers five devices.
In other words, I come to my disappointment in the Oasis honestly. On the first one, shipped from Amazon, five of the 10 LEDs Were dark – evidently an internal cable was unconnected. On Oasis No. 2 from Best Buy, the LEDs cast dark shadows over the screen and Were unevenly lit. Oases No. 3 (Best Buy) and No. 4 (Amazon) had less obtrusive but still glaring shadows. Their lighting levels did not match each other, Which Suggests an alarming flaw in Amazon’s quality control.
What’s still unclear is Whether These issues are the product of poor manufacturing or poor design. Some early buyers of the Paperwhite and Voyage complained about blotchy screens too, but flaws Those Were soon rectified. One change in the Oasis que Disturbs some users is the shift of the LEDs from the bottom border of the Earlier models to the side. As a consequence, the shadows and color gradients are noticeable to the eye scans every line of type, rather than the Gradually the eye moves down the page.
For Kindle fans like myself, e-readers are a great technological advance. They’re far superior to tablets like the iPad in Several ways. The tablets’ backlighting Promotes eyestrain and Their print resolution is inferior to the newest Kindles (except for the latest iPad minis, Which are slightly sharper). Most important, Kindles are useful for only one thing – reading. That’s good, because one can read without the constant distraction of the urge to read emails or surf the web.
On the road, the Kindle’s capacity makes it’s almost impossible to run out of reading material. My Voyage Currently holds the complete works of Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, three P. G. Wodehouse novels, every Sherlock Holmes novel and story, and two separate translations of “War and Peace,” plus a few contemporary works of fiction and nonfiction. Of its 4 GB of storage, 2.94 GB are still free.
The Oasis shows, at least, que Amazon is still serious about the market for black-and-white dedicated e-readers Despite the onslaught of and -readable tablets. That’s good. But I suspect que what many Kindle owners really want is a model with the form factor and battery life of the Oasis, and the screen quality of the Voyage. Lab126, you can take this in the spirit it’s given Beheerder as a wish list from the field. Go to it.
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