New Amazon Kindle arrives with two massive upgrades
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At its Amazon launch event in September, the retail and home tech giant unveiled a major new addition to its Amazon Kindle family of eReaders, in what appears to be the line’s biggest shake-up since the Kindle keyboard.
The Amazon Kindle Scribe is the first model in a new family of eReaders, joining the standard Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite, and Kindle Oasis. It’s Amazon’s most premium Kindle to date, bringing a notable upgrade in screen size over the existing models – and it also introduces a brand new feature to the range in the form of a stylus.
The Kindle Scribe has a large (for a Kindle) 10.2-inch screen, a panel that eclipses the 7-inch screen of the Kindle Oasis, the previous Kindle heavyweight in this regard. It’s a 300-pixel-per-inch screen, which matches the resolution of its siblings.
This large screen also makes it the largest Kindle we’ve seen in ages. Like the Oasis, it has a large brim on one side so it’s easy to hold, but there’s no prominent brim like the Oasis.
The stylus can be used for annotating documents as well as annotating, sketching and drawing in other apps. Amazon talked about being able to send documents to your Kindle from your phone and, as of 2023, from Microsoft Word, suggesting the device has better connectivity than older Kindles.
At the launch event, Amazon said the device is designed for note-taking and journaling, with the stylus designed to feel like a real pen in use. It doesn’t have a battery, so it doesn’t need charging, which gives it a big advantage over the Apple Pencil and similar tablets.
This isn’t the first e-reader we’ve ever seen with a stylus – models from brands like Onyx and Kobo also offer them – but this is the first Amazon Kindle with such an accessory.
Furthermore, the Kindle Scribe comes with either 16 GB or 32 GB of storage, matching options offered by the Paperwhite, but without an 8 GB option.
The device costs $339.99 in the US, which also includes four months of Kindle Unlimited bundled, and the pen is included in the price rather than having to be purchased separately. We’re waiting for pricing and availability elsewhere, and we’ll update this article when we receive that information.
This is a big change for the Kindle line and for Amazon’s eReader strategy, and we’re eager to test the new eReader, so keep an eye out for our hands-on, then full, in-depth reviews. We’re interested to see if the Scribe is the Kindle reinvention it promises to be, and if it makes it into our lineup of the best eReaders.