Review: Amazon’s top of the line Kindle Oasis gets a new feature

The Kindle is undoubtedly the favourite gadget of voracious readers. Though you can download the Kindle app on almost any device and buy all the books you want from Amazon on it, the Kindle is special because it’s the type of screen that isn’t back-lit and doesn’t give you immense eye strain, especially when we already spend so much time with laptops and phones. The Kindle uses e-ink and is the closest thing to paper if it were made of something digital.

The Kindle has practically no competition, except perhaps from itself because there are a few variants of the e-reader. The Oasis is the top of the line from the lot, and it’s just come out in its third generation.

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The Oasis has a bit of a different form factor than the others. It has a portion on the side that is a grip, only it has buttons which fall exactly where your fingers are likely to be so you can use them almost like a reflex to turn the page. Once you get used to this, it’s very difficult to go back to a Kindle on which you have to reach out to turn the page. That little action, which we use with real paper books, somehow feels like too much trouble. The screen is 7 inches and has thinner bezels than the other variants. It also has a metal body.

Warmed up for eye comfort

The first Oasis is something that really evokes nostalgia because it was adorably small and had a snap-on case that topped up the battery. You could pull the device off of the case and end up with the reading part which felt impossibly light — definitely lighter than any book I’ve ever held.

The next two Kindle Oasis versions look absolutely identical. I have them both in the same black or rather graphite colour and I cannot tell them apart at all. Amazon could have really done a great deal with the new Oasis 2019. They could have made the software feel like something that is not from twenty years ago and moved on to USB Type C, so that one isn’t stuck with that one regular USB cable that comes in the box.

The software is probably faster though it’s difficult to tell, but other than that, the one big change is that you can now make the page look warmer with a slider to adjust the level, quite separate from the brightness. There are 25 LED lights hidden in the Oasis and about half of them being in a warm tone. This is a great contribution to increasing reading comfort, but of course, not a reason to upgrade from the previous Oasis unless those have an unfixable problem.

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The warm tint will obviously work best in some conditions and not in others, so it will depend entirely on the type of lightning in which the user reads. It’s meant more for night-time and winding down to sleep, but you could as well find it more restful in the daytime. I gave it a mild level of warmth and found myself happy to leave it there because in direct white daylight, the screen in any case looks different and very much like a piece of paper.

The Oasis is a relatively expensive gadget specially when you add the price of a case to the package. Other variants like the Paperwhite aren’t dramatically different and are also very comfortable to read on, but Amazon has put in a smattering of differences to create a luxury Kindle of sorts. There’s much to love about most of the Kindles with their long, long battery life and the fact that they can hold thousands of books to take anywhere. Of all the gadgets one has, the Kindle is one that feels very personal.

But the Oasis 2019 needed to evolve a little more though we did speak to someone who turned out to have five Kindles and still lusted after the Oasis 2019 because of that one new feature.

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