The Kindle Oasis
Dec. 26th, 2020 01:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinOne of the Christmas gifts I just got was a Kindle Oasis, a member of a dying breed of handheld electronic device--the unitasker with a screen. It's just for reading (and buying, oh yes indeed buying) electronic books. It can't do anything your smartphone or tablet can't already do with Amazon's free Kindle app. And, unfortunately, in the way of such things, it's very much joined at the hip to the Kindle e-book store--the point is for Amazon to get even more of your money once you've got it set up. I haven't experimented with how easily it can be subverted to read other types of material, if at all.
Physical design
But since it only really does one thing, it can be physically specialized for that, and it is pretty exquisitely so. It has a touchscreen e-ink display, which is in some ways less capable than a phone screen in that it's slower and entirely monochrome--but it's lovely to look at, high-resolution enough that you don't notice the pixels, and unlike a regular backlit LCD or OLED display, it is reflective in nature and is perfectly readable and crisp even in direct sunlight.
It's cleverly designed to be used one-handed, more comfortably than a phone, except that it's a bit heavier. The device is nearly square, but its screen is the width and almost the height of a mass-market paperback page. The rest, to the left or right side (depending on which way up you're holding it), is a blank bezel area you can grab, with two physical buttons for going forward and back a page (which you can also do with swiping gestures, or by tapping the edges of the screen). The buttons are positioned so that you can operate them with your thumb if you're gripping the device with that hand. The device has an orientation sensor, and the display and the button controls will invert if you reverse it, so you can grip it equally well with your left or right hand. It doesn't rotate sideways--you read only in portrait orientation.
edit: There are a large number of reading options I hadn't discovered when I originally wrote this review, accessed through the "Aa" menu in the toolbar; it is actually possible to set the screen orientation to landscape, but it doesn't happen automatically as a result of rotating the device.
Most of the screen portion of the Oasis is very thin; the rest, undoubtedly containing the battery, is a little thicker, and the resulting ridge in back forms a kind of handgrip if you don't have a cover folded back over it. There's a cloth cover accessory, a little like Apple's iPad Smart Cover, which has a magnetic catch and will power down the device automatically if you close it. The cloth backing makes it easier to hold the device if you do have it folded back. There's also a power button on one end of this battery section, and a Micro-USB port on the other end. I'd have preferred USB-C, but I guess they haven't gotten with the times in this regard.
Light, text and power
The screen does light up, and to be comfortably usable, it pretty much has to light up. While the display is reflective, the "white" pixels are not actually a brilliant paper-white--they're more like a medium gray-tan, so the display looks great without self-illumination in bright daylight (in fact, it might be more readable than white paper under these conditions), but otherwise the reader's internal light is key. Fortunately, it's a really good light that illuminates the screen absolutely evenly with a comfortable brightness; you can adjust it so that it creates a convincing illusion of white paper. Most impressively, it's at least a two-color LED and the color temperature and brightness are independently adjustable. There are clever options to automatically throttle the brightness and make the light warm and yellow in the evening hours, much like modern phones have.
You can vary the font size over a fairly wide range--at largest, the letters are about a centimeter high; I've certainly known people with sufficiently low vision that this would not be adequate, but it will work for most. On the other hand, there are only a couple of sizes you can choose for the text of user-interface elements, which could be an accessibility barrier. You can apparently get it to do some screen-reading things over Bluetooth (see below). Out of the box, most books are readable only in Amazon's default font, a fairly good-looking serif face called Bookerly, but apparently it's possible to add fonts to the device over USB and use them instead.
edit: Again, there are options here I hadn't discovered in the "Aa" menu. You can actually choose any of nine built-in fonts, including sans and serif options and one designed for readers with dyslexia, and you can also vary the boldness, margin size, justification and spacing.
The e-ink display uses less power than a phone display, but Amazon's claim of a battery life of "weeks" is rather exaggerated--I think it assumes you'll be reading infrequently and won't be using the light, and, as stated, you will use it. A full charge on a new Oasis would probably last a couple of days of very heavy binge-reading, like I've been doing. The device, annoyingly, doesn't come with a charger (it does come with a USB-to-Micro cable). You can do some kind of syncing with your computer but I haven't experimented with that.
Sound, networking and software
The Oasis has no internal speaker, but can supposedly pair with a Bluetooth audio device to read text aloud or play Audible audiobooks (but I have not been able to get this to work with the one slightly janky pair of headphones I tried). There is no headphone jack; given the audiobook features I think they probably should have included one, but such is the way of the world now.
It downloads stuff via wi-fi, but I found that I could only get it to connect to the 2.4 GHz channel on our home router, not the 5 GHz. For downloading books, this is perfectly adequate. It's pretty easy to find the MAC address via the settings screens if you need it.
Amusingly, given that this is physically my first Kindle, Amazon identified it as "Matthew's 6th Kindle." I know why this is--I've actually had a lot of devices that ran the Kindle app, if you include not just phones but all the wonky old tablets I worked on a couple of jobs ago, and I think I at least set it up on several of them. Which is not to say they ran it particularly well. But, as I said, any one of them could technically do all the things this reader can.
It's pretty much just a book reader and Kindle store client; there's also a link to the Goodreads review/recommendation service. These functions are as snappy and responsive as they need to be. The device (or maybe just an Amazon account itself) comes with free Kindle access to a collection of dictionaries of a number of major languages, which you can download and then use to look up words while you're reading--this is surprisingly useful. It can also look up words in Wikipedia. There's some kind of "vocabulary builder" app that can quiz you with flashcards about words you looked up in the dictionaries, if you are so inclined.
There actually is a general web browser app, marked "experimental", but it is primitive and painfully sluggish, not good for much. The Oasis really isn't built to do this.
Reading books
This section was going to be at the top, but I didn't want it to be like those recipes that require you to scroll past a multi-page personal reminiscence to get to the ingredients list.
I find that I haven't been reading books a lot over the past couple of years, and I think it's partly that the attraction of "doomscrolling", as people call it now, is too great. There's this inexhaustible supply of outrage, horror and snark generated by the news, and everyone's two cents' worth of opinion on the news, that has great power to distract--and if you're waiting to get sleepy in a dark room, where someone else is also trying to sleep, that can be a terrible temptation that's actually easier to access than a paper book. I don't think it's been good for my mental health, which makes me think I should get back into reading more--reading books rather than the news or somebody's political blog.
Paper books are great, in some ways superior to any electronic device. But having a device that really doesn't do anything but read e-books, and is more convenient than a paper book in some specific contexts, might actually help. Even if it's a bit too closely tied to Amazon.
Physical design
But since it only really does one thing, it can be physically specialized for that, and it is pretty exquisitely so. It has a touchscreen e-ink display, which is in some ways less capable than a phone screen in that it's slower and entirely monochrome--but it's lovely to look at, high-resolution enough that you don't notice the pixels, and unlike a regular backlit LCD or OLED display, it is reflective in nature and is perfectly readable and crisp even in direct sunlight.
It's cleverly designed to be used one-handed, more comfortably than a phone, except that it's a bit heavier. The device is nearly square, but its screen is the width and almost the height of a mass-market paperback page. The rest, to the left or right side (depending on which way up you're holding it), is a blank bezel area you can grab, with two physical buttons for going forward and back a page (which you can also do with swiping gestures, or by tapping the edges of the screen). The buttons are positioned so that you can operate them with your thumb if you're gripping the device with that hand. The device has an orientation sensor, and the display and the button controls will invert if you reverse it, so you can grip it equally well with your left or right hand. It doesn't rotate sideways--you read only in portrait orientation.
edit: There are a large number of reading options I hadn't discovered when I originally wrote this review, accessed through the "Aa" menu in the toolbar; it is actually possible to set the screen orientation to landscape, but it doesn't happen automatically as a result of rotating the device.
Most of the screen portion of the Oasis is very thin; the rest, undoubtedly containing the battery, is a little thicker, and the resulting ridge in back forms a kind of handgrip if you don't have a cover folded back over it. There's a cloth cover accessory, a little like Apple's iPad Smart Cover, which has a magnetic catch and will power down the device automatically if you close it. The cloth backing makes it easier to hold the device if you do have it folded back. There's also a power button on one end of this battery section, and a Micro-USB port on the other end. I'd have preferred USB-C, but I guess they haven't gotten with the times in this regard.
Light, text and power
The screen does light up, and to be comfortably usable, it pretty much has to light up. While the display is reflective, the "white" pixels are not actually a brilliant paper-white--they're more like a medium gray-tan, so the display looks great without self-illumination in bright daylight (in fact, it might be more readable than white paper under these conditions), but otherwise the reader's internal light is key. Fortunately, it's a really good light that illuminates the screen absolutely evenly with a comfortable brightness; you can adjust it so that it creates a convincing illusion of white paper. Most impressively, it's at least a two-color LED and the color temperature and brightness are independently adjustable. There are clever options to automatically throttle the brightness and make the light warm and yellow in the evening hours, much like modern phones have.
You can vary the font size over a fairly wide range--at largest, the letters are about a centimeter high; I've certainly known people with sufficiently low vision that this would not be adequate, but it will work for most. On the other hand, there are only a couple of sizes you can choose for the text of user-interface elements, which could be an accessibility barrier. You can apparently get it to do some screen-reading things over Bluetooth (see below). Out of the box, most books are readable only in Amazon's default font, a fairly good-looking serif face called Bookerly, but apparently it's possible to add fonts to the device over USB and use them instead.
edit: Again, there are options here I hadn't discovered in the "Aa" menu. You can actually choose any of nine built-in fonts, including sans and serif options and one designed for readers with dyslexia, and you can also vary the boldness, margin size, justification and spacing.
The e-ink display uses less power than a phone display, but Amazon's claim of a battery life of "weeks" is rather exaggerated--I think it assumes you'll be reading infrequently and won't be using the light, and, as stated, you will use it. A full charge on a new Oasis would probably last a couple of days of very heavy binge-reading, like I've been doing. The device, annoyingly, doesn't come with a charger (it does come with a USB-to-Micro cable). You can do some kind of syncing with your computer but I haven't experimented with that.
Sound, networking and software
The Oasis has no internal speaker, but can supposedly pair with a Bluetooth audio device to read text aloud or play Audible audiobooks (but I have not been able to get this to work with the one slightly janky pair of headphones I tried). There is no headphone jack; given the audiobook features I think they probably should have included one, but such is the way of the world now.
It downloads stuff via wi-fi, but I found that I could only get it to connect to the 2.4 GHz channel on our home router, not the 5 GHz. For downloading books, this is perfectly adequate. It's pretty easy to find the MAC address via the settings screens if you need it.
Amusingly, given that this is physically my first Kindle, Amazon identified it as "Matthew's 6th Kindle." I know why this is--I've actually had a lot of devices that ran the Kindle app, if you include not just phones but all the wonky old tablets I worked on a couple of jobs ago, and I think I at least set it up on several of them. Which is not to say they ran it particularly well. But, as I said, any one of them could technically do all the things this reader can.
It's pretty much just a book reader and Kindle store client; there's also a link to the Goodreads review/recommendation service. These functions are as snappy and responsive as they need to be. The device (or maybe just an Amazon account itself) comes with free Kindle access to a collection of dictionaries of a number of major languages, which you can download and then use to look up words while you're reading--this is surprisingly useful. It can also look up words in Wikipedia. There's some kind of "vocabulary builder" app that can quiz you with flashcards about words you looked up in the dictionaries, if you are so inclined.
There actually is a general web browser app, marked "experimental", but it is primitive and painfully sluggish, not good for much. The Oasis really isn't built to do this.
Reading books
This section was going to be at the top, but I didn't want it to be like those recipes that require you to scroll past a multi-page personal reminiscence to get to the ingredients list.
I find that I haven't been reading books a lot over the past couple of years, and I think it's partly that the attraction of "doomscrolling", as people call it now, is too great. There's this inexhaustible supply of outrage, horror and snark generated by the news, and everyone's two cents' worth of opinion on the news, that has great power to distract--and if you're waiting to get sleepy in a dark room, where someone else is also trying to sleep, that can be a terrible temptation that's actually easier to access than a paper book. I don't think it's been good for my mental health, which makes me think I should get back into reading more--reading books rather than the news or somebody's political blog.
Paper books are great, in some ways superior to any electronic device. But having a device that really doesn't do anything but read e-books, and is more convenient than a paper book in some specific contexts, might actually help. Even if it's a bit too closely tied to Amazon.