How much would you pay for a book? £1.99 from your local second hand store? £11.99 for a premium best-selling hardback from a high-street chain? How about £229?
That’s the price of Amazon’s fully-specced, top-of-the-line new e-reader. The Kindle Voyage is its name, and the company which revolutionised reading obviously feels that there’s a market out there for a premium reading device.
The Kindle Voyage starts at £169 in price, but that’s the Wi-Fi only model. If you want 3G (for the ability to browse and purchase on the go) then you’ll need to stump up an extra £60.
So what exactly do you get for this extra cash? After all, the altogether excellent Kindle Paperwhite costs £60 less, and the basic Kindle a whopping £100 less. Has Amazon thrown in anything to make it worth the outlay?
In a word… kinda. First of all, you’ll immediately notice a difference in your hands. The Voyage is the thinnest and lightest Kindle yet, at 7.6mm deep and 180g. That’s 1.5mm thinner than the Paperwhite and 26g lighter. It may not sound a lot but proportionately that’s a pretty massive difference.
Picking it up is just the beginning, though. Seeing the Voyage’s display for the first time is when you really start to see where your money went. The Voyage’s screen is bright. Exceptionally bright. It also features light sensors, so that it’ll adjust the brightness automatically depending on the environment that you’re in.
Combine that brightness with the highest resolution seen on a Kindle and you have one hell of a display. The resolution of the Voyage equates to 300ppi, which is almost 50% sharper than the Paperwhite and almost twice as sharp as the basic Kindle. Words appear on the page as if they were ink on paper.
In fact, Amazon has even aimed to make the Kindle Voyage feel like paper, too. The screen on the device is ever so slightly textured, so that there’s a level of tact to it. This texturing prevents glare brilliantly, too. There’s no raised bezel either – the whole front of the device is flat glass.
The case of the device is premium in structure as well, being made of magnesium. This matte metal makes it feel more akin to a tablet than a traditional e-reader.
This case also has a rather nifty feature built into the front of it. Whilst the last generation of Kindles replaced hard buttons for a swipe feature to turn pages, the Voyage gives you both, sort of. You can now choose to turn on touch-sensitive sections of the frame to act as page turning buttons. You’ll even get a nice little bit of haptic feedback to acknowledge the command.
The Amazon Kindle Voyage is available to pre-order now from the official store. It’ll be released on November 4th. Just in time for Christmas, if you’ve got any particularly generous relatives.