Amazon Kindle Oasis
AMAZON GETS A STEP WARMER TO MAKING THE PERFECT E-READER.
THE KINDLE OASIS has been Amazon’s most luxurious – and expensive – ebook reader since it’s 2016 debut, but a small refresh to this new third-generation Oasis has cemented its place as the best Kindle money can buy, and a more formidable competitor to Kobo’s equivalent, the Forma.
The 2019 edition of the Kindle Oasis is almost physically identical to the previous model; the only spots it differs is in the addition of a warmer yellow-orange adjustable front light and an improved battery life. That warmer colouring makes all the difference to the reading experience, especially at night, as blue light has been found to be disruptive to sleep. If you prefer the older blue-coloured backlight, you can still opt for this via a hue slider. You can even schedule the backlight colour to change depending on whether it’s daylight or nighttime.
That said, you don’t have to pay a premium to get this feature: the much-cheaper new Kindle Paperwhite also has this adjustable light (although it’s powered by only five LEDs, as opposed to a whopping 25 in the new Oasis, and only brightness is adjustable), so the decision to spend the extra $200 on the Oasis will largely depend on how important this reader’s other little additions are to you.
For example, the Oasis’s metal exterior gives it a much more premium and elegant look and feel, and the physical page-turn buttons on the side of the device makes it easy to handle one-handed. And where the Paperwhite offers you a 6-inch screen and weighs 182g, the Oasis boasts a 7-inch glare-free display and weighs only slightly more at 194g – that’s just a 3% difference. Whether you like the asymmetrical design of the Oasis will depend on your personal tastes – we grew to like it, and found the rear bump made it more secure to hold when reading one-handed.
While the Kindle’s interface is pretty good, with stacks of features that make reading on a digital slate a great experience, there are some annoyances. Every time you begin a new book, for example, there’s an automatic ‘About This Book’ pop-up, which in turn prods you to use Amazon’s Goodreads service to track your reading. The Oasis also doesn’t display the book’s cover when you’ve got it in standby mode (as a Kobo does) but cycles through wallpapers that haven’t changed in a few years. And instead of displaying your device library on the homepage, the bottom third of the screen throws up curated recommendations you can buy – admittedly, that may appeal more to some users.
The one major drawback Kindle ereaders have in Australia, as compared to Kobo, is the lack of library-borrowing support. While Kobo has let you borrow ebooks from participating local libraries via OverDrive support, Amazon hasn’t jumped on that bandwagon, and doesn’t seem to have plans to. There is support for audiobooks via Audible, however, and you can download and listen to audiobooks on the Oasis by pairing a set of Bluetooth headphones.
In terms of battery life, Amazon says the Oasis will last for six weeks if you read for just half an hour a day. However, those who read for two or more hours a day will likely find themselves recharging about once a week. While we’d loved the Oasis more if Amazon had decided to go with a USB-C port for charging – it still uses microUSB – but with the addition of backlight hue control (finally!) there’s no doubt that the Kindle Oasis offers a super-premium e-reading experience.