Last year the Kindle Paperwhite finally gave ebook readers what they'd been asking Amazon about for years: A Kindle that could be read in the dark without clipping on a book light. It was a good product, but early adopters complained that the screen lighting was a bit uneven. With the 2013 model, Amazon has fixed that problem, improved the lighting, and thrown in a bunch of nifty software updates.
Warmer and whiter
Image: Scott McNultyThe new Paperwhite's screen (left) is warmer and more evenly illuminated than last year's model (right).
The new Kindle Paperwhite ($119, plus an additional $20 to remove Amazon's "special offers" advertising) is a dead ringer for last year's model. They share the exact same dimensions, design, and nearly identical weights. (The new Paperwhite is a whopping two ounces lighter; my limited powers of perception don't allow me to notice any difference.) In fact, the only obvious external difference is the branding. The familiar Kindle logo on the back of the e-reader has been replace with Amazon's.
Never mind the debossing. You'll be spending most of your time looking at the touchscreen of the Paperwhite. The screen's pixel density remains the same 221 ppi, which is higher than previous-generation E Ink kindles but not quite high-resolution enough to banish all jagginess from text. The old model offers good contrast, but this new model's whites are even whiter and blacks even blacker. This increased contrast makes text and images appear much crisper—and the older version was no slouch in this respect.
Like the original model, this Paperwhite illuminates itself by channeling light through a clever set of "light guides" that allow tiny lights peeking in from the side of the screen to illuminate the entire reading area. It's clever technology that really works, but in the first-generation Paperwhite some people complained of a banded or mottled interference pattern—basically, inconsistent lighting—at the bottom of the screen.
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