Amazon’s beautiful, functional, impractical Kindle Oasis reviewed

Amazon’s Kindle has gone through roughly two different design phases. The first began with the original Kindle in 2007 and ended, roughly, with the Kindle DX and Kindle Keyboard in 2010 and 2011. The second phase began with the fourth-generation Kindle and the Kindle Touch in 2011, which got rid of the keyboard and remodeled the devices in the vein of smartphones and tablets.

Amazon has built a bunch of features on top of the foundation laid by the Kindle Touch, but everything up to and including last year’s $200 Kindle Voyage has been a riff on the same basic idea. The Kindle Paperwhite added a backlight, and the Voyage was the first with a super-sharp 300 PPI screen (which the latest Paperwhite later inherited). So what comes next?

The Kindle Oasis is a major departure. It’s an asymmetrical design that’s dramatically thinner and lighter than the Touch design, but with one wider, thicker edge that contains the battery and doubles as a handle. The device itself sacrifices battery life, but it comes with a leather battery case that effectively doubles your reading time.

The issue, as it so often is, is one of price. Rather than making this new Kindle design available at the mass-market price of the Paperwhite or the standard Kindle or even replacing the $200 Voyage, the Oasis starts at a whopping $289. That’s a lot of money to pay for a gadget that only really does one thing, no matter how nice it is. But the Oasis is nice, and hopefully its design trickles down to the rest of the Kindle lineup over the next year or two.

One-handed wonder

Specs at a glance: Amazon Kindle Oasis
Screen	1448×1072 6" (300 PPI) E-Ink Carta
OS	Kindle OS 5.7.4
Storage	4GB (non-upgradeable)
Networking	802.11b/g/n, optional 3G
Ports	Micro-USB
Size	5.6" x 4.8" x 0.13-0.33" (143 mm x 122 mm x 3.4-8.5 mm) for Kindle, 5.7” x 4.9” x 0.07-0.18” (144 mm x 125 mm x 1.9-4.6 mm) for case
Weight	4.6 oz (131g) Wi-Fi, 4.7 oz (133g) 3G, 3.8 oz (107g) for cover
Battery	Unknown capacity; Amazon claims two weeks of life if used for 30 minutes a day with wireless disabled and brightness set to 10, eight weeks with charging cover.
Starting price	$289.99 with Special Offers, $309.99 without; $359.99 for 3G with Special Offers, $379.99 for 3G without
Price as reviewed	$379.99

It’s possible to use the cheaper tablet-y Kindles with one hand. They’re small and light and you can tap or swipe the screen pretty much anywhere to turn pages. But the Oasis has been designed specifically for use in one hand, and it shows—it feels so natural that the Paperwhite and the Voyage seem clunky by comparison.

The Oasis’ asymmetrical bezel gives you a lot of room to put your thumb, and by default it’s going to rest right about where the page turning button is—yes, though it includes the same touchscreen that all other Kindles use, the Oasis also sees the much-requested return of actual physical buttons for turning pages. The top button turns forward and the bottom button turns backward, regardless of which hand you’re holding the tablet in. The screen automatically detects the way you’re holding it and flips the contents of the screen accordingly.

Because your thumb rests so comfortably on that page turn button, you can make your way through a book without ever having to lift your thumb unless you want to go backward to read something you missed. It’s a simple thing, but it feels really great to hold and to use.

This is true regardless of whether you have the Kindle’s battery cover connected or not, but I found that when I was actively reading I preferred to take the cover off. The Oasis and its cover are connected to each other with magnets and pogo pins rather than any sort of latch, so detaching the Kindle from its battery and then reconnect it to the case when you’re done is simple. When they're connected, the case actually charges the Kindle’s internal battery rather than powering the e-reader directly. This was a smart decision—the Oasis’ internal battery promises just two weeks of runtime between charges instead of the standard four weeks, but as long as you store the Kindle in its case when you’re not using it you won’t need to worry about the Oasis going dead if you prefer to take the case off while you’re reading. Both Kindle and case are charged via a micro USB port on the Oasis itself, and there’s no way to charge the case’s battery without first connecting it to the Kindle.

The case itself is an understated black, red, or brown leather that makes a closed Oasis look more like a small leather-bound notebook than an e-reader.