The new Kindle Oasis, the next generation of Amazon’s premium e-reader line, has just been announced. The new device is incredibly thin at just 0.13 inches on one end. It achieves this thinness through an asymmetric design that puts the battery and internal components on one end of the device, which works well at providing an ergonomic grip for one handed use. While this is also Amazon’s lightest Kindle, at 4.6 ounces, that thinness and lightness comes at the cost of battery life, which is down to only 2 weeks, compared to the Kindle Voyage’s 6 week battery life. To make up for this, Amazon is including, at no cost, a new battery case that adds an additional 7 weeks of battery life. The screen is the same 300 ppi screen form the Kindle Voyage, but now with 60 percent more LEDs to give it a wider range of brightness. The new Kindle Oasis can be pre-ordered now for $289.99 and will be released April 27th.
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Any word on if it can be flipped around? i.e. I’m left handed and that asymmetrical design wouldn’t work for me unless I could flip it. Surely they’ve though about that?
Yes it can. It’s the first Kindle with an accelerometer, so it will automatically rotate the screen when you move it from hand to hand.
Didn’t the KDX have one?
From the description on Amazon:
“Whether you choose to read with your left or right hand, Kindle Oasis automatically rotates the page orientation to match.”
Something I find interesting is that the FCC filing (here and here) for this shows it has Bluetooth, yet there’s no mention of Bluetooth in the specs. The FCC testing also shows it connected to headphones, yet the final product doesn’t have a headphone jack. I’m anxious to see if a teardown reveals a spot where a headphone jack once lived.
I can’t speak to the headphone jack, but the bluetooth is likely due to the fact that as of v3 Bluetooth is merely a protocol layered on top of WiFi and as a result pretty much every WiFi chip contains Bluetooth support, even if it is not enabled. On these, Amazon likely just didn’t pay the license to enable Bluetooth support since it is pretty pointless on this type of device.
I thought that might be the case, but the FCC testing report shows the device was tested while connected to a BT speaker. I would think Amazon’s software would need to support BT for that to happen, and not just have the capability present in the chip, but I could be wrong.
$300….. what?
I thought the same thing. But then I figured it may help drive down the price of the other models I have always wanted to get, so maybe there’s hope on that front.
While the price seems high, I’ll point out that the Voyage with a case is $260. Charging $290, including the case and adding a battery to it is not unreasonable if you were already considering a Voyage, especially since the new one has a better design and better technology included.
What’s memory on this?