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Kindle-Oasis-Feature

Amazon's get-go Kindle revolutionized the ebook reader business and sold out within hours. The device was a huge success, despite a $399 price tag. Over the terminal 9 years, Amazon has driven the Kindle's base cost down while improving image quality, performance, bachelor storage, and bombardment life — the basic Kindle now sells for as little as $80, while the top-end Kindle Voyage is $199. Today, Amazon took the wraps off its new high-cease ebook reader, the Kindle Oasis, and announced the device would carry a $290 toll tag.

Amazon justifies that price tag with a new form factor, improved backlighting, and a battery instance that can bulldoze the Kindle Oasis for upwardly to nine weeks. Different nearly any other device on the market, the Kindle Haven is deliberately asymmetrical, with an extended bezel on i side and a raised bump on the back to brand the hardware more comfortable for unmarried-handed reading. A handful of features, like a requested page-plough selection, are coming back to Kindle Oasis as well.

Kindle-Oasis

Prototype by PCMag.com

As PCMag notes, the bump on the back isn't just a gimmick. A built-in accelerometer measures which hand you're gripping with, and flips the screen to brandish it correctly and the heart of gravity for the device is e'er located in your palm, no affair how you hold it. Screen resolution is the aforementioned, but the additional LEDs meliorate effulgence past 60% and help proceed things uniform.

The device's storage pool remains pocket-size, at 4GB, and its screen resolution hasn't changed from the 300 PPI offered past the Kindle Voyage or Kindle Paperwhite. Amazon clearly wanted to launch a luxury make around its Kindle ebook readers, and hands-on reports suggest they succeeded — but whether or not people want a $290 defended production is very much an open question. The iPad Mini ii, later all, is just $269, and at that place are dozens of Android devices available for under $300.

Amazon would undoubtedly counter that the e-Ink displays it uses for Kindle get in a distinct and separate product that can't be direct compared with other tablets. That's true, every bit far as it goes, only people don't simply lock on to single features so decline to consider alternatives at any toll. There comes a point when traditional tablets may look "expert enough" to convince users to buy something more multifaceted as opposed to a dedicated product. The flip side to this, of form, is that Paperwhite and Voyage are both nevertheless available at lower price points.

With ebook sales falling for the first fourth dimension in 2015, Amazon may have felt that creating an aspirational product made more sense than trying to push yet another circular of Kindle price cuts and discounts through to a market that's come up to expect them. Amazon'due south hardware efforts take always been aimed at hooking customers into the visitor's ecosystem, and if you buy a new ebook reader, you probably want some content to go with it.