Amazon Kindle Paperwhite : Quick Review

I always loved reading books, and i have quite a collection at home. But shelf space, was becoming sort of a problem, so went the e-book route.

I started out on an android Tablet, using an app named aldiko, and as time went on, and the availability of online purchases, i moved to the kindle “app”. I purchased a 10.1 inch tablet, which i installed the app on, and things were going quite well, until one day, i dropped the tab right on my face, cause i was sleepy.

The tablet being 10.1 inches is quite heavy, weighing around 500 gm’s, so stopped reading on the tab, and started on the phone.

Since all my purchases synced between devices, i could continue on from where i stopped .
The galaxy s8+ being 6.2 inches, still couldn’t provide the best experience in reading, and at 10.1 inches the big tab was so much better to read on. Large fonts, sharp text, and i could do other stuff on it.

So after putting it off for quite a while, i bought myself a Kindle Paperwhite (Wifi edition). The screen is 6 inches, but being wider, did look better than my galaxy s8+

So the Kindle Paperwhite is an e-reader, and not a tablet, and it cannot do the things a tablet can. You can only read, on the device, and nothing else, other than maybe use the inbuilt browser to surf the web.

How does the e-reader differentiate itself from tablets.

FIrst and foremost, the e-reader uses an e-ink display. This display needs to refresh only once, per page change, and then just stops using power. This feature allows for the e-reader to last for weeks, months even as per your usage.

The tablets on the other hand, keeps refreshing, 60-100 times a second. We cannot normally see this refresh occurring,as it happens really fast. But using a camera, you can notice the refresh taking place. At the same time you notice that the kindle, is not refreshing at all. This helps in reducing eye strain, and you can read for longer on a kindle.

This constant refreshing of the screen is the reason that you can change pages on tablet, real fast as compared to the e-reader taking a little longer to refresh the page. The tablets also allow for page curl animations, which look really nice.

The kindle paperwhite is grayscale, so all those read actual books, or manga, which are anyway grayscale. So you wouldn’t be losing much there.

I would say the tablets are better for reading more colorful content, like magazines, comics. So apps like flipboard, pocket and zinio would look much better on the tablet. The same is not doable on the kindle, and the experience without color is really bland.

So kindles are for e-books alone.

Tablets on the other hand, due to the abundance of apps available, it is also prone to keep notifying you of any new emails, messages which is quite annoying when you are trying to read.

There are settings to stop these notifications from appearing, but its not available on all tablets and on an iPad you would have to change the settings app by app. Some apps even though on airplane mode would have notifications.

Kindle paperwhite, no such distractions, its meant for reading and it does that really well.

The kindle also has led lighting , which allows reading in the dark.

The kindle is not for everyone, if you read a lot of books, and need a device that wont die on you when you are on vacation, the Kindle Paperwhite is for you.

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Post Author: Vinayak

Self-confessed geek from the days when computer memory was measured in Kilobytes

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