Pros and cons of Kindle Oasis 2017
Pros for me (I’m a translator)
- Excellent dictionaries for English uk, us and French, French to English, built-in translation service, built-in wikipedia.
- Vocabulary words, really great for language learning.
- Overall smoothness of use and relative ease of accessing books via the cloud and collections.
- Nice screen size.
- Can read comics such as Calvin and Hobbes, which look fabulous, and the other kindles can’t do this. (I tried to download the same book to my Voyage (when I still had my Voyage, and it wasn’t permitted).
- GOLD.
- Waterproof, finally.
- 7 inches, finally.
Cons
- For me, appalling battery life of two days.
- Angular shape, which is just a leetle too large for my hand for comfort (I know a lot of people get cross when others voice this opinion, but, it’s my experience that it is too sharp and the buttons never seem to be quite in the right place. I miss the smooth, silky feel of the back of the Voyage, but I don’t miss the haptic buttons at all).
- Hefty price, for two days reading, seems ridiculous. I have my little lipstick-sized charger in my purse, but I would prefer the reader to just last a little longer really). I sort of regret trading in my Kindle 4 (the one with the buttons). It was very basic, low-res, no lights, no touch, and the battery lasted eons, book after book. No frills, but lots of reading. I was thinking of getting the new Basic, but I see they have made it quite a bit bigger, and added touch (thereby adding a layer of fuzziness, I assume).
I used to have a Kobo Aura One:
Pros
- it really looked like an actual hardback book, the way the font was spaced and arranged. I can’t explain why, it just looked like a replica book.
- in addition to the beautiful display were, at the time I purchased it, it was only available from Canada, and the exchange rate made it comparatively cheap.
- 7.8 inches, more like a hardback size page.
Cons
- It felt a bit cheap, actually, coming from the Voyage, almost a hollow feel, and the back did not feel premium. (I loved the smoothness of the back of the Voyage, I used to enjoy stroking it as I read, weird.
).
In the end, I sold it on here, as I really missed the Kindle ecosystem, and the Kobo rewards and badges, which I was pathetically excited about, never measured my reading time or number of books read accurately, so I ended up stopping looking at them.
I’m not sure why with the KAO2 I actually thought this was going to be IT, the reader I had been searching for all my life, and that would finally bring me peace, and just pure reading enjoyment. I realize that was dumb, and that no one reader out there is going to meet my requirements.
I asked Amazon for help with my battery last week, but have hit a brick wall with them where they send me the following request, and each time I send the requested files, they wait a day, then send me the same request, after promising to investigate my case (I have a case Id number, etc., I’m in the system, just going round in a loop between chat, and mail etc.) :
“We've heard back from our Technical Team and this is what they asked us to get from you :
Would request you to charge the device to 100% and then use it until it's 10% or less and then we can pull up the logs and will investigate further on this.
We'll be waiting for your response.
Thank you for your co operation and support on this.”
So, now I don’t know if I should just cut to the chase and ask for a replacement, or switch back to Kobo. I wish I could just settle on a device and be happy with it. I pretty much am happy with the KAO2 apart from the battery life - it’s just that I expected to be blown away by the Oasis, made complete by it. And I wasn’t.