If you have ever owned a Kindle, you’d know how indestructible they are. It somehow never seems to age. You’d expect a consumer tech product today to be slow and sluggish just a couple of years into its lifecycle. The Kindle is refreshingly different and has stayed that way for a very long time. I still use the Kindle Paperwhite that was gifted to me back in 2014. And there is very little that I would like to change. So, when Amazon launched the new Kindle Paperwhite, I was keen to see and experience the changes First-hand. Understandably, Amazon decided to not fiddle too much with the things that have received very little criticism from avid readers. Instead, Amazon chose to increase the display size for the first time ever, add more LEDs and an adjustable warm light to the display and switch to Type-C – the latter ensuring that you don’t have to hold on to an increasingly redundant micro-USB cable. The Signature edition that I am reviewing gets some added goodies in the form of an auto-adjusting backlight and wireless charging.
The new Paperwhite continues to be waterproof. The design should be familiar to anyone who has spent any amount of time with a Kindle. The E-ink display dominates the front of the device and sits flush with the frame (a carryover from the 2018 generation) and gets a soft-touch plastic body. It fits comfortably in the palm and the slight increase in dimensions should make very little difference for most people.
The larger screen real estate is definitely a welcome change with the 300ppi screen being just as good as ever. The bezels have shrunk too and together with the larger display, the lack of a recessed screen makes for great viewing. The 17 LEDs are a big improvement over the five on the previous-gen model on paper. But in everyday use, I don’t think a lot of readers will notice the improvement over what was already a very smooth front lighting system in the last-gen Paperwhite. Then there’s the adjustable warm lighting that lets you change the colour temperature of the display much like on a smartphone display. You can set the colour temperature to change based on the time of day too. The Signature Edition goes a step further allowing you to set the colour temperature adjustment to auto and it works flawlessly. You can just set it to auto and forget about it. The wireless charging is nice to have but it is probably among the additions that make the least difference in how you use your Kindle. If you have used one before, you’d know that the battery life is weeks long and you usually only need to charge it once a month or so.
If you are in the market for an e-reader, then there is nothing quite like a Kindle. The added bells and whistles on the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition makes it a bit more tempting and considering that you are going to use a Kindle for quite some time, it makes sense to be future-ready by shelling out the premium that the Signature Edition commands.