The Kindle that lets you take handwritten notes is on sale for Amazon Prime Day. The 16GB model of the Kindle Scribe is currently $85 off and available for $255 instead of the usual $340. It’s not the lowest price ever — the ereader hit $240 on Prime Day in July — but it’s the lowest price it’s been since then. And, while there’s likely a new Kindle or two on the horizon, nothing has been confirmed yet.
Amazon Kindle Scribe (16 GB)
The Kindle Scribe is our pick for the best E Ink tablet that’s also an ereader. There’s little to no lag when it comes to drawings and handwritten notes, and we like that the basic stylus is included in the price (rather than having to buy separately like some E Ink slabs). You also get several brush types to choose from, such as fountain pen, marker, and pencil, and it’s easy to create and manage notebooks in which you can put those stroke styles to work.
We gave the device a score of 85 in our full review of the Kindle Scribe, again praising the writing experience as well as the premium build and ample screen size. One caveat is that it lacks support for writing in the margins on most Kindle ebooks. While there’s a small library of titles that allow you to write directly on the page, they’re mostly crossword and planner titles. For most ebooks, you’ll create notes in a pop-up window attached to the text.
As an ereader, the Scribe has some capabilities that other ereaders don’t have, such as letting you read two pages side by side when the screen is in landscape orientation. It also has a flush-front display and auto-adjusting warm front light. We also like how easy it is to read borrowed library books on the Kindle. Also a recent update enabled handwriting-to-text conversion that you can email to your contacts.
The company sent us a second review unit on which the yellow stripe was not present. In general the display also seemed warmer, making it look more like physical book pages. We’ve removed the score from our review until we’re able to test the replacement unit longer and make sure the yellow stripe problem doesn’t recur.
Page turns are fast on the seven-inch display, which has a 300 pixel-per-inch (ppi) density for black-and-white content and 150 ppi for colour content. The device has 32GB of built-in storage and supports Audible audiobooks. The Kindle ColorSoft will last up to eight weeks on a single charge and you can top up the battery wirelessly or via USB-C.
The ereader has an IPX8 rating. This means it can be submerged in up to two meters of fresh water for 60 minutes and 0.25 meters of seawater for three minutes, according to Amazon. So, you can take the Kindle Colorsoft to the pool or beach without worrying too much about it getting wet.
It has a pinch-to-zoom feature which should be helpful for those who read graphic novels on the Colorsoft. The auto-adjusting front light is also handy. Another big positive is that, unlike other Kindle models, the Colorsoft doesn’t have lock screen ads by default.