But the Oasis has been designed specifically for use in one hand, and it shows-it feels so natural that the Paperwhite and the Voyage seem clunky by comparison.

They’re small and light and you can tap or swipe the screen pretty much anywhere to turn pages. It’s possible to use the cheaper tablet-y Kindles with one hand. Unknown capacity Amazon claims two weeks of life if used for 30 minutes a day with wireless disabled and brightness set to 10, eight weeks with charging cover. But the Oasis is nice, and hopefully its design trickles down to the rest of the Kindle lineup over the next year or two. That’s a lot of money to pay for a gadget that only really does one thing, no matter how nice it is. Rather than making this new Kindle design available at the mass-market price of the Paperwhite or the standard Kindle or even replacing the $200 Voyage, the Oasis starts at a whopping $289. The issue, as it so often is, is one of price. The device itself sacrifices battery life, but it comes with a leather battery case that effectively doubles your reading time. It’s an asymmetrical design that’s dramatically thinner and lighter than the Touch design, but with one wider, thicker edge that contains the battery and doubles as a handle.

The Kindle Paperwhite added a backlight, and the Voyage was the first with a super-sharp 300 PPI screen (which the latest Paperwhite later inherited).

The second phase began with the fourth-generation Kindle and the Kindle Touch in 2011, which got rid of the keyboard and remodeled the devices in the vein of smartphones and tablets.Īmazon has built a bunch of features on top of the foundation laid by the Kindle Touch, but everything up to and including last year’s $200 Kindle Voyage has been a riff on the same basic idea. The first began with the original Kindle in 2007 and ended, roughly, with the Kindle DX and Kindle Keyboard in 20.

Amazon’s Kindle has gone through roughly two different design phases.

Kindle oasis