In our quest to digitise practically anything and everything, Amazon isn't making it any easier for physical books to stay relevant as the company has just launched the brand new version of the Kindle Paperwhite in India.
Ebooks were priced dearly in the early days, but that is not the case anymore. Sure, there are other ebook readers in the market, but it's the overall ecosystem of Amazon that brings people back to the Kindle.
The first Kindle Paperwhite was launched in 2012 and we were quite impressed with its performance when we reviewed it. Continuing with its yearly refresh, we have the second generation Amazon Kindle Paperwhite 3G among us this year.
So is it a completely new device or are the changes merely cosmetic? Let's find out.
Build and Design
For someone who has seen the first generation Kindle Paperwhite, it will be difficult to point out the differences. Both generations of the Paperwhite look almost identical.
Visually, the only difference is seen on the rear side, where the older generation Paperwhite has Kindle embossed on it, whereas the newer one has the Amazon branding.
It weighs a mere 206 grams which is lighter than the 222 grams of the previous Paperwhite. Dimensions are identical at 169 x 117 x 9.1 mm, with a 6-inch capacitive touchscreen as was seen with the older model.
The bezel has enough room for comfortably holding it in one hand and you can tap on a considerably larger area to go to the next page, easing single hand operations. The rear side has a nice rubberised finish which gives you a good grip.
The power/standby buttons on the Paperwhite are located on the bottom edge beside the microUSB charging port while the all other edges retain a clean look.
We got the Kindle Paperwhite with the leather cover (which needs to be bought separately). It is the same cover as was seen with the older Paperwhite as the dimensions are identical.
Removing the Paperwhite once it is neatly fit into the cover needs a bit of patience. But you will rarely want to do that.
The cover has a lovely textured finish and the gray coloured magnetic flap with the Kindle branding adds a lot of finesse to the cover.
Considering both the Paperwhites look identical, most of the features are similar as well. For instance the pixel density is the same at 212 ppi, it has the similar 2GB onboard storage of which 1.25GB is available to the user (Amazon claims that you can store upto 1100 ebooks), free cloud storage for all Amazon content and support for TXT, PDF, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively and HTML, DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, through conversion apart from its native AZW format and so on.
There are a bunch of new features as well. The first thing that you visually notice is the addition of Goodreads, which is present on the top row of the menu bar between the search and settings icons.
This is a social network for bibliophiles from which you can rate books, comment on books, share passages from books and so on.
The contrast on the newer Paperwhite is noticeably higher when you place it beside the older version. Amazon has put in a new processor in as well, which it claims is 25 per cent faster than the older Paperwhite. We shall see how it fares ahead in the review.
Navigation is quite simple and if you have used the older Paperwhite, you will be right at home. The Home button brings you to the home screen where
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