Great news to all the ardent e-book readers! Amazon’s Kindle Oasis goes on sale at a whopping cost of $250. The “all-new” Kindle Oasis, 2017 edition comes with beautiful design, high-resolution E-ink screen, water resistant and battery. Although it offers a bunch of features which makes you crave for it there are few areas where it lags making you hesitate in buying it.
Key Features:
- Review Price: $249.99
- 7-inch 300ppi display
- Waterproof
- 6-week battery life
- Physical page-turning buttons
- Audible integration
Kindle Oasis (2017) Price:
All new Kindle Oasis is available to the customers at £229/$249.99 for an 8GB model and £259/$279 for the 32GB version. Another 32GB model with a 3G option is available for £319/$349.
PROS
Design:
The Kindle Oasis has a 7-inch 300 pixel-per-inch(ppi) display with a booklike shape which can fit more words on the screen when compared to the 6-inch screen. The new design is 3.4mm at its thinnest point, weighing around 194 grams (6.8 ounces) which is 10 grams lighter than the less affordable Kindle Paperwhite. The battery and all the innards are stuffed on the thicker side of Kindle. As a result, the handgrip shifts the center of gravity to your palm making it balance perfectly on your hand.
Kindle Oasis comes with a dual-core 1GH processor which helps you to turn the pages faster. There are physical page turn buttons on the thicker side of the device to turn pages. You can also turn pages by tapping on either side of the screen. There’s an accelerometer which rotates the pages when you switch hands.
Display & Battery:
Kindle offers the users to customize the fonts and its sizes for a better reading experience. Oasis comes with 8 fonts, 14 sizes and 5 different levels of boldness. There’s an option to increase the size of the display icons on home screen and library. If a person has sensitiveness to light then he/she can invert the display with black background and white text.
For an integrated lighting, 12 LEDs are embedded into the device. If you’re sensitive to the light, you can invert the display to display white text on a black background. You can even customize the size of icons on the home screen and library for a better viewing purpose. An ambient light display can adjust the brightness for you automatically.
Coming to the battery life, Amazon says that your Kindle device will last up to 6 weeks without charging the device if you read 30 minutes a day by turning off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and setting the backlight to 40%.
Water Resistance:
The newest feature of the upgraded Oasis is that it supports the water resistance feature. Amazon says that you should feel comfortable taking it into the tub, the pool, or the ocean. The device will function even in the water after immersing up to 2 meters for an hour.
CONS
Audible narration
Although the Oasis does not have speakers, it can pair easily with Bluetooth headphones in order to listen to audiobooks. If you have access to Amazon’s Audible service then you can toggle between the Audible version and the e-book versions. Oasis doesn’t display the text content when it plays the audiobook while the Amazon’s mobile app includes an immersive reading feature where it displays the content of the book along with audio which helps you involve in the book you read. Oasis lags this feature.
Price
At $250, the 8GB Kindle Oasis offers only water resistance, great battery life. It doesn’t support the immersive reading, speakers. Although Amazon says it has an “experimental” browser, you can’t post to Facebook because it is designed for the users to enjoy reading their books without any distractions from the social media. Despite its great features, the high price of the Oasis makes you hesitate in buying the Kindle Oasis as other product of the same company, Kindle Paperwhite is available is at just $120 which is less than half of the price of Kindle Oasis.
If these negatives don’t matter you, then Kindle Oasis is the ideal e-book reading device you are looking for.
