The Kindle Oasis, which Amazon shipped last week, was designed for luxury and comfort, and it wasn’t until I started using it that I realized I hadn’t ever really enjoyed holding other e-readers. It all comes down to design: one edge of the Oasis is thicker than the other, so its center of gravity rests in whatever hand is holding it. The result? Reading from this Kindle feels less like holding a screen and more like holding a mini magazine with its pages folded back.
Without the cover, it's incredibly light
This trick only works if you use the Oasis without its cover — a point that’s particularly ironic since the Oasis ships with a cover. (The only other Kindle to come with a cover was the original Kindle back in 2007.) Even though I promise that you’ll read most comfortably on the Oasis without its cover, Amazon has good reason to include it: the cover jumps your battery life from two weeks without it to nine weeks with it. But there’s an unavoidably frustrating issue with the newest Kindle, even for long-time Kindle people who are enticed to buy: price. For $289.99, you may think you deserve a battery cover, dinner, and a nice bottle of wine with your Oasis. And this is the price for the low-end model with ads on its lock screen and Wi-Fi (not 3G). Compared to Amazon’s previous model, the Kindle Voyage, the Oasis costs nearly $100 more. The most expensive Oasis comes with 3G and no ads on its lock screen, but will set you back $379.99.
I see the Kindle Oasis’ design as a plus, but long-time e-reading fans might need a little while to get used to it. As one of my friends said when he saw the Oasis, "It’s, uh, square." Though the Oasis isn’t an exact square, it definitely leans more square than rectangle. But its 6-inch screen size hasn’t changed. The overall build is 30 percent thinner and 20 percent lighter than the last Kindle — so light (4.6 ounces) that I panicked and thought it had fallen out of my bag at one point. Its thickest edge houses the battery, LED lights, and page-turn buttons, so you can only change pages with one hand at a time instead of using your right and left thumbs to page forward or back from either side of the screen like you can on the Kindle Voyage.
With page-turn buttons on just one side of this Kindle, what happens when you roll from your right side to left side in bed or at the beach and want to switch hands? The Oasis has a built-in accelerometer that flips the screen around so you’re not stuck reading upside down. And the page-turn buttons automatically switch positions, so the top button still pages forward and the bottom button still pages back (or however you want these programmed in Settings).
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