Review: Amazon’s $100 Kindle is light and cute, and it has the basics

Amazon’s Kindle Scribe is an exciting new high-end device in its e-reader line that pushes the Kindle experience forward. But it’s equally important for Amazon to keep pushing the basic plan for people who want to jump into the ecosystem but don’t want to spend too much.

So we come to the new $100 Kindle. Also referred to as the “2022 release”or “Kindle (11th gen)”on Amazon’s product pages, this model costs $10 more than the one it replaces (inflation affects us all), but it has new benefits. to help justify the price hike. For the first time, a basic Kindle has the same 300 PPI screen density as the rest of the line, and Amazon has optimized the top and side bezels around the 6-inch screen to make the device smaller and lighter. USB-C, Bluetooth support for audiobooks, and increased storage of 16GB round out the list of specs.

We’ve had the new Kindle for several days now, not long enough to read more than a few hundred pages or drain the battery, but long enough to form some impressions of the device’s strengths and weaknesses. The main question to be answered is: who should buy this Kindle, and who should spend $40 more on the waterproofing and bigger, nicer screen of the current Kindle Paperwhite?

Equipment overview

The killer feature of the new Kindle may be how much smaller it is than the current Paperwhite or older models. The 6-inch screen is the same size as the old Paperwhite, but Amazon has reduced the display bezels on the top and sides to look more like the current Paperwhite. The result is a lightweight device that’s especially comfortable in children’s hands (the Kindle Kids version with case, two-year warranty, and one-year Amazon Kids+ subscription costs an extra $20).

As for the new screen, everything is in order. It’s definitely nice that it now matches the 300 PPI density of more expensive models. For those who are still using a non-illuminated or lower resolution Kindle, this will be an upgrade.

There are two things to know about the screen that don’t show up very well in our photos. First, with just four LEDs on the front (compared to 17 on the current Paperwhite), you may notice that the screen isn’t perfectly evenly lit. On my test unit, this was most noticeable at the top of the display, although the content on the screen was always perfectly readable. Second, the front light has a rather bluish tint compared to not only Kindles with “warm light”capabilities, but also the tint of the older 10th-gen Paperwhite we compared it to. If you’re sensitive to blue light, especially if you read a lot right before bed, your eyes may thank you for purchasing the Paperwhite instead.

The $100 Kindle is also not waterproof like the last few generations of Paperwhite, so it’s not a great device for “relaxing in the bath or by the pool.”Its USB-C port has some sort of humidity sensor that will prevent it from charging if it detects a little water in the port, which could save you from accidental spills, but it’s not the same as full waterproofing.

The only noteworthy hardware feature that Amazon doesn’t advertise is that the $100 Kindle appears to use the same processor as the newest Paperwhite (MediaTek MT8110; the new Paperwhite and new Kindle run on the ancient SunSpider browser test takes about 8000 milliseconds compared to 11700 milliseconds for the previous generation Paperwhite). It’s still a pretty poor processor compared to any budget smartphone, but compared to older Kindles, there’s a subtle hint of extra speed when loading or opening books or navigating through menus.