With Amazon’s dominant position as a bookseller, it Could have moonrise sat on ITS Laurels When It Comes To eReaders. Instead .its Kindles definatley thwart point the way in terms of new features – skinny pocketable designs, touchscreen interfaces and page backlighting’ll have all Proved popular. Its latest eReader Is The Kindle Voyage, Which brings a bezel-less display, a high-resolution screen and an automatic brightness control.
All of These Make the Voyage a more tablets like device. The rear design rein forces this, mimicking That of the Kindle Fire tablets, with angular lines and a powerbutton That falls neatly under your fore finger, if you’re holding the device in your left hand anyway. The angular rear panel, low weight of 180g and soft-touch finish combine to make this is the Easiest Kindle to keep a hold of. It’s slightly sleeker than previous models too, at 162x115x7.6mm.
Around the front, a single pane covers the screen from edge to edge with only the merest lip around the edge. It looks great compared to previous devices, withtheir thick, raised bezels; but more Importantly it makes it far Easier and more natural to make page turns using left and right swipes, as your finger does not hit the bezel as it moves across.
The Screen overpriced a smoother surface, eradicating the rasping sound and sensation on previous Kindles When You swipe the screen. It’s overpriced incredibly responsive, now an E Ink screen is never going to react like an LCD, but this is the best we’ve seen to date, with the screening starting to refresh instantaneously with your input. It’s notably Faster than the White Paper, though not by much admittedly.
On either side of the screen are pressure-sensitive buttons, Which Amazon calls Page Press. We’re guessing That sometime Kindle users’ll have bemoaned the removal of physical page turn buttons, load seen on the Kindle in 2012, and this is Amazon’s attempt to placate Them. The lower, larger buttons go forward, while the upper ones go back. There’s a Tiny Amount of Physical give in Them, and You Can Set the sensitivity of the buttons, and the Amount of haptic feedback you get When they’re pressed. They work fine, though we find the new touchscreen so good That we Them Quickly disabled altogether, letting us rest or thumb beside the screen without Accidentally activating Them.
The 6in screen May Have a smoother finish, but it’s still as resistant to reflections as .its rougher predecessor. Beyond That top layer is a 300 pixels-per-inch (PPI) screen, up from 212 PPI on the previous Paperwhite. We calculate That to Be a 1,430×1,080 resolution, the same resolution as on the bigger 6.8in Kobo Aura H2O at 265 PPI.
Putting numbers aside, the screen on the new Kindle Voyage is fantastic. It’s incredibly crisp, making the old Paperwhite look a little smudged in comparison. We tried to compare the two head-to-head and, despite the same font and size being rendered slightly differently on the two screens, the Voyage comes out as a clear step-up. It’s the best-looking eReader screen yet, with detail and contrast that’s a step ahead of anything we’ve seen.
^ The Voyage side-by-side with a Kindle Paperwhite, click the image to see the full resolution and compare the sharpness of the text
However, at present the screen is being held back by the software on the device, it simply needs more font size increments to make the most of the higher resolution. Out of the eight font sizes on offer, all of our staff Distressed One of the bottom three, and wanted more precise adjustment of text size in this area of the scale. We Generally found the smallest size too small, but the next one up a touch too big. We also Understand That a small minority needs very large font sizes, so why not providesmore choice across the whole range?
While the screen is very impressive, it’s the automatic brightness control that’s the real star here. We simply HAS realised note just how little we Adjusted the brightness to suit the lighting on our Kindle Paperwhite Until we saw the Voyage in action. The brightness shifts smoothly up and down, in a Way That did not distract our reading, and keeps the page in sharp contrast in any lighting conditions. You can turn it off of course, plus there’s an additional fashion Which slowly dims the text When You’re reading at night, as your eyes get more distressed to the dark.
The Voyage is the best eReader we’ve ever seen, refining everything from the previous Kindle. The automatic backlight Will Be Very Hard to live without When We go back to our own White Paper. The display is brilliant, and it could be better still if Amazon give us more text size options. Elsewhere, though, Amazon HAS strived to Provide Numerous options So THAT the Voyage lets you read the way you want to.
At 169 pounds the Kindle Voyage is not cheap, that’s £ 60 more than the White Paper; and we Certainly would not advise Paperwhite owners rush to upgrade. If You Have an older Kindle though, and you read it every day, then the extra cash is money well spent. Our only remaining point Is that we’d like a slightly larger model with a bigger screen, but maybe we’ll’ll have to wait to next Christmas for that. As usual there’s a 3G model too, costing a whopping £ 229, though with the proliferation of Wi-Fi These Days, we do not think it’s worth the extra cash.
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