This is the last Kindle review you'll ever need to read.
It's not that Amazon's going to stop making Kindles. Just the opposite—even as the company has turned its product into a synonym for its category, the way every MP3 player was an iPod, Amazon keeps steaming ahead, making new devices.
This is the last Kindle review you'll ever need to read because everyone knows the story by now. The newest Kindle, the Oasis, is the best Kindle ever, the lightest and thinnest and most book-like Kindle of all. But then, so was the last one. The next one will be even more so. And the one after that? Hoo-boy, can you even imagine?
You'd love the Oasis, even if it is the most expensive Kindle of all, but you probably already love your Kindle Paperwhite, or your Voyage. If you don't already have one of those, you're probably not interested in one of these. It's not like there's some teeming mass of buyers out there waiting for ebook readers to get better.
I won't tell you to buy an Oasis. It almost feels fiscally irresponsible to do so, like suggesting you spend twice as much on "organic" lettuce from the gross bodega down the street. But I won't tell you not to buy it. If you can afford $290 and you want a tiny, lovely, forever-lasting ebook reader that costs at least twice as much as the excellent Kindle Paperwhite, which does all the same things, then buy the Oasis. You won't regret it for a second.
Let's start with a few things that are true of the Voyage that are also true of the Oasis. Actually, I won't even write new sentences. I'll just copy and paste what people (including us!) said about the Voyage, but change the name to Oasis.
Here goes: The Kindle Oasis is more compact, sharper and essentially just a step up from any e-reader the brand has made since the inception of the technology a few years ago (Techradar). With a resolution of 300ppi, the Oasis's 16-level grayscale e-ink screen is on a density par with smartphone screens a generation or so ago (WIRED). It's certainly better than the gray-brown pages of the secondhand paperback you're reading, and unless you're really into $75 high-gloss coffee table books, it's probably better looking than just about everything in your bookshelf (The Verge). The Oasis has 1GB of RAM compared with the 500MB of the step-down models, which makes this device a tad zippier (CNET). However, since e-ink is inherently sluggish, the device just isn't anywhere as speedy or responsive as the latest iPads or Android tablets. If the point of a Kindle is to take away all other distractions so that you can just read, the Oasis is the pinnacle of that process to date (Gizmodo).
I could go on. And on. Even as the Kindle changes, the Kindle doesn't change. It keeps getting thinner, it keeps getting lighter, and it keeps getting simpler, but it remains the same basic experience year after year. (Case in point: It's still not waterproof, which is the worst. Don't drop the Oasis in the tub.)