[BanditoB]

I received my Scribe Colorsoft in Fig yesterday and thought that I would leave a few initial impressions.

First of all, I really like the Fig color. It stands out and is different from all of my other devices and makes them look decidedly plain.

The screen on the Scribe Colorsoft is very very nice and looks great to me. Yes, it is slightly more gray in the background but this does not detract from the overall quality or ease of viewing the screen. The colors I think are quite good for an eInk screen and I’ve only been using the standard mode so far. I’ve yet to try vivid. I looked at a couple of my cartoon books with color panels and they looked very nice to me. Almost as good as what you’d see in a newspaper though slightly more muted. The frontlight is very even and pleasing to my eyes, especially because you can adjust the warmth of the display. My Scribe Colorsoft arrived in the evening, so I was using the backlight extensively last night and I had to have it on a fairly bright setting, around 20 out of 25, for the best viewing experience so it will definitely have an impact on battery life if used a lot at night.

Then pen is very comfortable and well balanced and the writing experience for me was excellent. There is just the right amount of drag with the pen on the screen so that it doesn’t feel like writing on glass. My penmanship is iffy at best, especially on a very slick surface, so writing on the Scribe Colosoft screen with its light drag actually helps me to write a bit more clearly. The eraser feature of the pen is also very useful and convenient, especially when working on crossword puzzles. The button, however, is another issue. It’s not very prominent and isn’t very easy to find by feel. With the pen being completely cylindrical now, there is no easy way to locate the button without visually searching for it, so I don’t think that I’ll be using it much as it is simply too much effort to locate it when needed. That being said, the ink flows well on the screen with no apparent lag and the screen is thin enough that it appears as though you are writing directly on it and not on a layer that’s beneath/behind glass.

The system itself is very responsive and quick which really makes it pleasurable to interact with. I have noticed that some touch actions with my finger don’t always register and take a couple of tries to activate the feature whereas the pen never misses. This is slightly annoying, but certainly not the end of the world. The new interface is very useable and well organized, but could use a better method of keeping track of the book(s) that you are currently reading. I had a book that I had been reading a couple of weeks ago on my regular Kindle Colorsoft and it was nowhere to be found on the Scribe Colorsoft so I had to look through my library to find it. Once found, it downloaded and took me to the last page that I was reading, but I expected it to be in the Recents list and it wasn’t there.

The setup process could be improved. I tried using the Kindle app on my iPhone to set up the Scribe Colorsoft as recommended during set up, but it failed to offer me the option to join my WiFi network which the iPhone was already connected to. It showed me all the surrounding networks but not my primary network so I canceled out of it and set up the WiFi network manually on the Scribe Colorsoft itself. The app also had a section for WiFi networks saved to my Amazon account, but I have opted out of that as I see no reason to share that sensitive information with Amazon.

Once the WiFi connection was sorted, the Scribe Colorsoft downloaded and installed a firmware update, 5.19.1, and then it was simply a matter of logging into my Amazon account and then my library started appearing as expected. I do have one book that won’t show the actual cover in the library grid view. It only shows the generic icon with the title and the author. If I check in the book itself, it does have a cover but it isn’t showing up in the library view. I looked into what I could do to resolve this, but came up with nothing definitive.

Overall, I am very pleased with my Scribe Colorsoft and it has been a great upgrade from my original 2022 Scribe which will now go to my husband. He most graciously allows me to upgrade to the latest and greatest as long as he can have the previous device.