Amazon Kindle – The lightest and most compact Kindle, with extended battery life, adjustable front light, and 16 GB storage – Without Lockscreen Ads – Black

A device with a single purpose: reading
Everyone has a smartphone these days, so at this point the Kindle is for one very particular audience: people who want to read a lot of books, and read them with a minimum of distractions. With this version, Amazon has refined the Kindle to the point where it’s just about ideal for this purpose. I’ve owned several previous Kindles, including an early Paperwhite, and currently own a couple of iPads, an iPhone, and a MacBook. For the purposes of long, immersive reading sessions, this Kindle is my best option. The battery life is long enough so that even with constant reading you only have to recharge once or twice a week (you can extend that by turning off wireless). The Kindle also has by far the best screen for immersive reading: it’s sharp and clear, with many options for different lighting conditions ranging from bright sunlight (Kindles leave tablets in the dust as far as bright-sun reading is concerned) to pitch black (the dark mode format is ideal for this). You can choose whether to read with a vertical orientation or a horizontal one — and this option of a horizontal orientation allows you (among other things) to read poetry on a Kindle without imposing premature line breaks. This Kindle is also extremely light and easy to hold for hours on end (my iPad mini is too heavy for that). And as with all Kindles, you can adjust the type size and font so that reading is comfortable for you – I love paper books, I really do, but I need bigger type.In a way, though, what’s best about this Kindle is what it doesn’t have. You can’t read your email. You can’t go on social media. Amazon’s Kindle browser is perpetually “experimental” — good! I pick up the Kindle when I want to read books, not when I want to lose my afternoon down an internet rabbit hole. That said, you do get just enough of the internet to assist in your reading. From within any book you can look up unfamiliar names/places on Wikipedia, and there’s a great built-in dictionary too. (You can download dictionaries for any language you read, and set them as your default in settings). But apart from those features, the internet might as well be on Mars. Fine by me. If I want to look at videos of puppies or lose my temper about politics, I have my phone (and several other machines, unfortunately). When I look at my Kindle, I can feel my blood pressure go down. More to the point, I can hide my phone under a cat and read books for hours and hours.That might not be your idea of an ideal afternoon. If it is, and you know who you are, this Kindle is pretty inexpensive and much lighter and easier to carry than tablets or physical books. It allows you to carry thousands of books around with you and then sit and read them without distractions. It’s limited in its other functions – and that’s exactly what makes it ideal.As you can probably tell from the above review, I have the patience of a gnat when it comes to content I don’t want to see, and for that reason I opted for the ad-free version. This allows me to have the lock screen be the cover of the current book I’m reading, which is extremely endearing. That said, the version with ads does not insert ads into your books; they’re not obtrusive in that way. So you can definitely save a few bucks by getting the version with ads – it won’t mess with your reading experience.

Perfect Size
While the Kindle PaperWhite may have more features than the regular Kindle, I found the size of the Kindle to be the most appealing aspect of the two. I decided to lose out on the few features the PaperWhite had and I did not regret that decision.I can fit my Kindle inside of my pants pocket. If it was a little bigger, it wouldn’t be able to fit. Even though it’s smaller it doesn’t impact the readability. Furthermore, it fits very nicely in my hand while reading. It’s not so small that it feels like a phone but it’s also not so large that it feels uncomfortable or difficult to hold.The experience of reading is what I expect from the Kindle. The pages turn relatively quick and the only thing I did need to do was turn on the page refresh per page because I did notice that they bled into each other without it. Besides that, the reading experience is great.Online people mentioned that the library of the E-Readers (in general, not just the Kindle) takes up way too much space for advertising but personally that isn’t an issue for me because I only stay within my Library tab which is where all my samples and books are. I rarely leave this tab so I don’t notice the advertising they do on the Home tab.The performance isn’t very good when navigating the library. I don’t think this is specifically with the Kindle but instead with most E-Readers in general. Navigating the library is quite slow but because I’m spending my time reading 98% of the time rather than researching books, it doesn’t bother me.Overall, I’m glad I got it. I can easily download samples and buy them when I’m done and the process is very simple and seamless. If you want something portable that’s comfortable to hold then I would recommend this Kindle.