The new Kindle Paperwhite is, as I said in my review , a fantastic device that somehow manages to improve on the already pretty well-refined Kindle formula. It does this by borrowing a couple of the luxury features from the vastly more expensive Kindle Oasis and dropping them into a device that’s close to half the price: waterproofing and Audible syncing. Amazon has dropped the price of the device to £99.99 ahead of Christmas , and it should make a fine gift if you’re still shopping around. Yes, it was £89.99 for Black Friday, but unless you also happen to have got a time machine as part of your Christmas shopping, then this is likely to be as good as it gets in 2018. And if you *have* got a time machine, then it’s probably best to get something from the future rather than an e-book reader. Just a suggestion. Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, the Kindle Paperwhite.
It’s not the cheapest Kindle, but it improves on the basic £60 model in pretty much every way. It has a sharper display, a backlight with brightness controls for reading in the dark, a screen that is flush with the bezels rather than set back, and it comes with twice the storage. Not that storage space is ever really a problem with Kindles, but the new Paperwhite will let you store around 6,000 books on its 8GB of internal storage – though fewer if you fancy getting into audiobooks too.
That’s right, the new Kindle will let you pair Bluetooth headphones and play your Audible books natively on the device. In a brilliant touch, if you own both the Kindle and Audible version of a book, the two will sync progress between them, meaning you can listen to your book on a walk to the station, and then continue reading once you board the train. It’s a little thing, but a very nice one. And that’s really what the new version of the Kindle is all about: lots of little niceties that add up to a really compelling product. Not enough to upgrade on their own, perhaps, but if you want a new Kindle at £99.99, this is the right product at the right price. Buy it now from Amazon
