OPINION: The latest Kindle Scribe may be a more niche prospect compared to the allure of the smaller, more portable Kindle, but it’s a device that I use almost daily.
The big 10.2-inch e-ink screen not only allows me to squeeze more text from my favourite books onto the page than its smaller sibling, but it also benefits from the Scribe’s rapidly refreshing e-ink tech that makes it feel more responsive in use than competing alternatives from Onyx.
E-ink is already designed to be kinder to your eyes than regular screens, but elements like automatic brightness adjustment and the ability to bathe the screen in orange light in the evenings make things even easier on the eyes.
But, as the name suggests, the Kindle Scribe’s main purpose isn’t to read books – even if it is a very good device for doing so.
No, the Kindle Scribe and its big screen are primarily there to act as a digital notebook of sorts, allowing you to create notebooks full of notes and sketches with the accompanying Kindle Scribe Premium Pen.
It’s way nicer than the first-gen stylus was, with a lighter, more ergonomic design and even a rubber tip that makes the sensation of erasing feel spookily close to its low-tech counterpart.
But while I praised the hardware in my Kindle Scribe review (and continue to do so), the software was lacking in several key areas. Well, that was the case until a free update arrived on my Kindle Scribe earlier this week.
While the 5.17.3 update might sound unassuming, it introduces three new features to the Scribe experience.
The biggest of which, in my opinion, is an update to the Active Canvas technology that launched with the latest generation of e-ink tablet.
The fact that you couldn’t write directly in Kindle e-books was a bit of an oddity of the first-gen Scribe, and something that Amazon was keen to rectify with the second-gen device – but its first attempt was a bit of a swing and a miss.
Rather than simply doodling over the text in your books as one might expect, your notes are transformed into an image that sits in line with the text, wrapping itself within the page with the book’s text reshaping dynamically around it.
That might not sound bad, but in reality, the results were similar to when you’d try to add an image to a Word document. Text just went everywhere.
It was messy, and there really wasn’t much point in using it. However, the new update brings a second way to use Active Canvas – and it’s way more natural. In fact, it leans on the tradition of scribbling notes in the margins, though with a tap of a button, you can extend the margin for extra writing space.
Like with the other way to use Active Canvas, these notes are anchored to the text you’re referencing, staying in place whether you change the layout of the page, but are denoted with a small icon. Tapping the icon will bring up the margin full of hand-written notes.
This is exactly what Active Canvas should’ve been from day one, and while it might seem like a small change, it’ll certainly encourage me to take notes in books going forward.
I’m similarly impressed with the new AI-powered handwriting refinement feature – especially as I’d describe my handwriting as messy at the best of times, let alone when I’m furiously scribbling notes in briefings and meetings.
Sometimes I can barely read my handwriting myself, so the fact that the Scribe turned a hand-written note into a much neater script font without a single error genuinely impressed me. It’s a feature that’ll certainly come in handy when I need to share notes with colleagues.
Similarly, the Scribe can now also create a summary of my notes in a similar script font. It’s nothing we haven’t seen from AI-powered phones of late, but it’s nice to see on a device focused predominantly on note-taking.
It’s just a shame that, despite the ability to convert my messy handwritten notes into legible text and even summarise them for me, I still can’t search for text within notes using the Scribe’s search feature as I can with the competing Remarkable 2.
But, given the new features added with this single update just months after release, I’m confident that it’ll appear somewhere down the road.
