Hands-On with Amazon's Kindle Oasis: Our Impressions

The best Kindle yet, and the most expensive

After a leak on Tuesday night and the product page going live on the official site on Wednesday, Amazon finally launched the Kindle Oasis in Beijing on Thursday afternoon, with best-selling author Liu Tong as its spokesperson.

What we care about most, of course, is the Oasis itself.

They say a first impression lasts a lifetime. The Kindle Oasis leaves one impression on the eye and quite another on the hand.

Your first look at the Oasis will probably catch you off guard. Few electronic products today use an asymmetric design, let alone one with such a large bulge along the bottom.

But once it's in your hand, you see the point: holding the Oasis with one hand feels familiar. Imagine standing in a subway car, holding a thin little book in one hand with the pages you've read folded back — that's roughly the feeling.

With the logo gone from the front and the body squeezed down to 3.4mm at its thinnest point, the Kindle Oasis is Amazon's smallest and lightest e-reader. At 131 grams, it also stands in sharp contrast to smartphones, which keep getting heavier.

Amazon got to 3.4mm and 131 grams by hiding three-quarters of the battery in the cover that comes with the device. That's also why the back of the device has a raised section: the battery and the processor both sit there, and the rest of the body is nothing but screen.

The leather cover has no clasp or any other spare part; it holds onto the Oasis entirely through magnets inside. Press it on and it gives a click like a car door closing, then starts charging.

Amazon sells the Oasis and its cover as a bundle. But I've gotten used to going out without the cover. The Oasis is so light that in a coat pocket you can barely tell it's there.

The hand is more sensitive to weight than the numbers on a spec sheet suggest. After half a day of reading on the Oasis, picking up the iPhone 6s Plus on my desk already feels odd. As for the 180-gram Voyage, I can hardly remember how I carried something that heavy around every day.

The Odd Design Choices All Serve a Better Read

For a device like the Kindle, which does nothing but let you read yet may sit in your hand for more than an hour at a time, weight and grip matter enormously.

Everywhere you look, the Oasis's hardware was designed for one-handed reading — the bezel on the side with the page-turn buttons, for instance, is much wider.

Not everyone likes this asymmetry, but the wide blank space next to the page-turn buttons means your fingers don't have to hook around the edge of the device.

Another choice that isn't pretty but is useful: the two raised page-turn buttons on the Oasis's face. This is the first time physical page-turn buttons have come back to the Kindle since 2011.

Every earlier Kindle tried, for looks, to blend its page-turn buttons into the shell, and pressing them never felt crisp. The Oasis is different. Its buttons press as cleanly as an iPhone's power button, with a little more travel.

Turning pages is the thing you do most often while reading; an hour of it means at least several hundred presses. The Oasis's page-turn buttons trade an awkward shape for a better feel.

If You'd Rather Skip the Cover, Lower Your Expectations for Battery Life

If the Oasis's asymmetric design has a drawback, it shows up when you switch hands.

The Oasis uses gravity to work out whether you're holding it in your left hand or your right, so either works. The catch is that you have to turn it 180 degrees for the page-turn buttons to behave; other Kindles have buttons on both sides and don't put you through this.

Without the battery cover attached, the Oasis is probably the shortest-lived Kindle on a charge. In my use, with the front light at two-thirds, a full day of reading can run the battery flat.

That isn't much of a surprise. Because of how the display works, E Ink's power draw depends more on the number of page turns than on anything else. Most people don't read for that many hours straight, and don't need to charge daily the way they do with a phone. But in the past you could take a Kindle on an 11-hour transoceanic flight, or through a weekend, without checking the battery.

The Oasis is probably not the prettiest electronic product you've ever seen. A thin seam still runs around the edge of the body, fine enough to trap grit, and most smartphones today manage to look more finished.

But set against what the Oasis does well, these are small complaints. It is still the best electronic "book" there is, and no Kindle suits long stretches of holding and reading better.

With the logo gone, the front of the Oasis holds nothing but two page-turn buttons and the screen. Once you step into the world the words on that screen build, none of its flaws matter.

The Screen: Amazon Says It's Mainly Thinner, But More Has Changed

The Oasis's spec sheet says it carries over the same 300ppi E Ink screen. On paper, that matches the Voyage and the Paperwhite 3.

When the Kindle first arrived in 2007, reading on a phone still meant a crude picture in which you could see the pixels with your naked eye. Today LCD pixel counts have climbed past the point of meaning anything, and screens keep getting clearer.

E Ink's advantage is that it works more like ink on paper, which makes it easier on the eyes outdoors.

LCDs also still light themselves from behind, shining light out of the screen straight into your eyes. Like the Kindles before it, the Oasis lights itself from the side, bending the light evenly across the screen through a layer of glass on the surface. Plenty of people like to read under a lamp before bed because it tires the eyes less; E Ink works on the same principle.

At the launch event, Kindle product manager Herve Letourneur told QDaily that the biggest change to the screen this time is that it's thinner. "Every generation of Kindle improves the screen," he said. "This time, to make the Oasis thinner and lighter, we adjusted several of the layers in the middle of it."

The biggest step forward in the Oasis's screen is that its touch is more accurate. Reading on the Voyage, I got into the habit of marking passages on the screen and then, once I'd finished a book, sorting my notes in the Kindle app on my Mac — notes sync seamlessly across every Kindle device and app.

But the Voyage's capacitive touchscreen wasn't precise enough. At a small type size, lifting your finger would often catch a different word, or even a different line.

Once you're used to the precision of a smartphone touchscreen, that gets annoying.

I don't know whether the adjustments Letourneur mentioned changed the touch performance, but either way the same mis-taps didn't happen on the Oasis.

A new processor may also be at work: the Oasis responds to touch faster than the Voyage, too. It still doesn't feel as unhindered as a mainstream smartphone, but typing and opening menus both feel much better.

Software: It Passes Now

Speaking of the touchscreen, the Kindle's other long-running problem — a dated interface — has largely been fixed over the past three months by one system update after another. For the details, see this earlier QDaily report.

The new interface also fixes the tutorial. In the past, switching on a new Kindle for the first time forced you to follow along, turning pages and marking passages. The drawn-out routine irritated long-time users, and a tutorial that long did nothing to help new ones remember any of it.

Now the Kindle starts up straight into reading, and an explanation appears on screen only when you actually reach for a particular feature. That kind of tutorial works far better.

The Kindle still assumes you're already an Amazon customer, though. Register as a new user through the device itself and the first step is filling in details that include your credit card, your zip code and your email.

In the US, where Amazon is the largest online retailer, that's no problem. But Amazon isn't nearly as common in China, which makes this unfriendly to anyone who got a Kindle as a gift.

What Is the Kindle Still Missing Before It Can Replace Paper Books?

One common objection to the whole idea of an e-reader: phone screens are already so big, so why buy a device that only reads?

I can give you a pile of numbers explaining why it suits reading better than a smartphone. The Oasis, for instance, fits a 6-inch E Ink screen into a 131-gram body; the 172-gram iPhone 6 Plus, by comparison, has an actual screen area only three-quarters of the Oasis's.

But that won't persuade anyone used to reading on a phone. Plenty of statistics already show that most people barely read a book after they leave school — television, web pages, official accounts, Weibo, news apps, Moments. Books stopped being the only way to get information long ago. If you only read something now and then, a phone is fine.

The Kindle can never compete with the smartphone; it can't persuade most people. Perhaps the entry-level 499-yuan Kindle can get parents to order one on the promise that reading is easier on their children's eyes, but the Oasis isn't that device. It was always aimed at a niche within a niche.

From 2011 on, Amazon began releasing 6-inch Kindles at a range of prices each year. The cheap ones got cheaper, down to 499 yuan now. The expensive ones got more expensive too: from the Paperwhite at 849 yuan in 2012 to the Voyage at 1,499 yuan in 2014. This time the Oasis adds another 900.

Amazon has never published specific Kindle sales figures, but after the Paperwhite had been on sale for a while, CEO Jeff Bezos said that with every generation of Kindle, the expensive model is the one that sells best.

The Oasis needs to catch the person willing to put 2,399 yuan into a reading tool and then keep spending more on books — not the person buying an E Ink device to advertise their geek credentials or to shoot a photo for Moments.

Only by catching that group can Amazon sell more books through the Kindle, and get more publishers to digitize more books, faster.

According to the Association of American Publishers, e-books have stayed at around 20 percent of sales over the past two years. China is worse. Take Zero to One, which sold more than a million paper copies in 2015: its e-book edition sold just 100,000 copies last year. In other words, most people who read a lot of books are still buying paper.

I've used a Kindle since the Kindle 2 in 2009 and replaced it every year or two, and I have to say the Kindle Oasis is the best Kindle there is.

Some people say rival products are better because they handle ePub and PDF well. For anyone unwilling to pay for books, that's true.

But just as video sites replaced Xunlei downloads as the main way people watch film and television, once an industry becomes mainstream enough, the audience it has to reach is the one happy to pay to cut down on hunting around.

Where the Oasis disappoints is screen size. It's still 6 inches. That's bigger than a phone, but next to a paper book it's still too small:

The width of the Oasis's screen is closer to that of a rock-bottom British or American mass-market paperback — the cheapest form a paper book takes, with no thought for the reading experience, tiny type and a release months after the hardcover.

For reading, the Oasis would suit better at 7 or 8 inches.

The Biggest Problem Isn't the Hardware

The other problem is content. Without books, the Kindle is just a piece of hardware and no fun at all. On turning paper books into digital ones, the Kindle still isn't doing well enough in China.

Of the 100 best-selling paper books on Amazon China in 2015, once you set aside 8 coloring books, children's picture books and vocabulary books that can't become Kindle editions anyway, 15 still had no Kindle edition. In the US, by comparison, setting aside coloring books and picture books, only one title had no Kindle edition.

Only 15 missing sounds tolerable? But a fair share of them got a Kindle edition only weeks, or even months, after the paper edition went on sale.

In February and April this year we checked how far the top 10 titles in 9 categories on Amazon's 2015 annual bestseller list had gone digital:

Over those two months, 14 of them got a Kindle edition. Having one beats not having one, of course, but by that point at least three months had passed since release.

Publishers' reasoning is easy to follow: if an e-book costs them one paper sale, they lose not just that book's revenue but the printing, warehousing and returns costs behind it, while one e-book sale fewer costs them nothing extra. So Chinese publishers today often hold the e-book back until paper sales slow, or set a high enough e-book price to keep it from eating into paper.

If even the bestsellers aren't all there, the less mainstream titles hardly bear mentioning. It took Amazon five or six years in the US to make the Kindle edition the publishing industry's default simultaneous release. In China, not enough books have been digitized. Until that is solved, most people who buy books regularly still can't accept it.

For the Kindle to become a big business in China, Amazon has to solve the book problem first.

(One more thing: the Chinese-market model can still sign in to the US store. If you're used to buying books in their original language, there's no better, more convenient or less restricted channel than the Kindle.)

Photos: Zhou Shaohong