Amazon is going to be holding an event in September. Although the company hasn’t said much about it, David Limp, SVP of devices and services at Amazon, took to LinkedIn recently to say that they wanted to bring people together at the new facility in Virginia and dropping a save the date for 9 September.
It’s not uncommon for Amazon to host events in September. It’s a good launch window for the Black Friday and holiday shopping periods, with customers keen to get their hands on new devices. It’s at such September events that we’ve seen the likes of Amazon Astro, the Echo Wall Clock and other such niceties.
But what I’m looking for isn’t a nicety, it’s an essential: the Kindle Oasis has been woefully disregarded in recent years and it’s time that Amazon corrected this.
For those who don’t know, the Oasis is the prince among Kindles. There’s no bendy plastic around the rear, no compromise on the front lighting: it was crafted to be the ultimate reading device which is why its stagnation has me riled. The Kindle Oasis was unapologetically expensive when it launched, crafted to fit your hand, ingenious with its magnetic covers and when the second-gen model landed, it had the biggest display of any Kindle device.
That display is still the largest and the best – I’m excluding the Scribe here – with the most effective front lighting, adaptive brightness and colour temperature adjustment. It’s a better reading experience than the Paperwhite which most people choose, but it’s a lot more expensive too.
It’s also a Kindle I’m no longer using. Why not? Because I read every single day without fail and since the launch of the Oasis that I own, I’ve charged it so many times the battery is essentially spent. I only get a few days of reading, which tells me one thing: it’s definitely time for a new Kindle Oasis to be announced.Now the Oasis isn’t perfect: sure, the buttons to turn pages and the metal unibody make it better to read on than any other device, but it’s still encumbered with a Micro-USB socket.
Yes, exactly the sort of thing that would see steam coming out of the ears of European Parliament Members, because you need a different charging cable for it. That’s right, all my other devices are USB-C – in fact all the other Kindles are USB-C – while the Oasis carries the Micro-USB like an albatross around its neck.
Amazon Kindle Oasis
The ultimate reading device, this is for book lovers who consume books at speed and want the best device available to read them on.
In truth I wouldn’t change the design of the Oasis at all. I love the feel of the cool metal in my hand, it’s so much more satisfying than plastic, but there is one area I’d love to see overhauled and that’s the Kindle Store. Sure, it gives access to books, but it’s never quite as intuitive as I want it to be, it’s so hard to see exactly what you’ve read before and where you’ve got to in a series – especially if you’re diving into Prime Reading or Kindle Unlimited. I want the Kindle Store to sell me books, but also catalogue my reading on my Kindle and off, to bridge the physical and virtual book worlds. Because as any reader of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series will tell you, you cannot differentiate these books based on the blurb alone…
So that’s what I want to see. You can keep the AI-powered cleaning robots with integrated Ring cameras, you can press pause on voice-controlled popcorn maker or sunglasses, but please Amazon, don’t abandon the best Kindle you’ve ever made.
