The Kindle Oasis is a masterful showcase in usability and design, but can Amazon’s e-reader justify the price tag?
Like sensible shoes, boxes of staples, and that plastic bag in your kitchen that’s filled with other plastic bags, it’s really difficult to get excited about e-readers. They’re functional and mundane. Unsexy grey slates that can’t load Candy Crush.
The worst ones stand in the way of your efforts to read, but the best ones are barely noticeable at all, melting away into the background as you slide into a novel-induced trance. Get a decent e-reader and you’ll forget you own a decent e-reader. You’ll only remember reading.
Amazon has had this philosophy nailed down for a while, and the latest in its Kindle range, the Oasis, is the most refined and subtly handsome e-reader that the world-dominating librarians at Amazon have yet made.
It’s thinner than a biscuit and lighter than a phone, with a touchscreen and an ergonomic, thickened edge that’s weighted to rest comfortably in the palm. A folding leather cover doubles as additional battery capacity, while sensors will flip the page 180-degrees so that the reader can be held in either hand.
And then you’ve got the standard features of the Kindle range: they hold more books than you could possibly read on a beach holiday. Their 300ppi e-ink displays are matte-textured and incredibly sharp, looking indistinguishable from a printed page, even in direct sunlight. You can look up definitions or see how long it will take you to finish a chapter based on how fast you’re whizzing through pages; all features that subtly enhance but never get in the way of your reading. The Kindle knows what job it’s here to do.
It costs as much as the moon though. The best e-reader in the Kindle range, the Oasis is also the priciest, starting at £269 for the wi-fi only model, and costing £329 for a version with free 3G built-in.
Whether it’s worth shelling out for a rectangle dedicated to reading is down to how much you care about books, global capitalism and personal encumberance. Either way, the Oasis is a beautifully unexciting showcase in usability and function, and one of the best designed objects ever to be mass produced.
Rating: ★★★★★
amazon.co.uk/kindle
The Specs
Price: £269 (wi-fi) / £329 (wi-fi and free 3G)
Screen size: 6-inches
Resolution: 300ppi
Dimensions: 143mm x 122mm x 3.4mm (thin end) and 8.5mm (thick end)
Weight: 131g (238g with cover, free 3G model weighs an additional 2g)
Gallery