10 Kindle Oasis Features Amazon Hopes Will Make You Buy This e-Reader

With its Kindle Oasis e-reader, Amazon is hoping to attract more people to its other services, such as Kindle ebooks, Amazon Prime and e-commerce.

Amazon has gone with a completely new design in the Kindle Oasis. Rather than centering the screen in the device, Amazon has opted for an off-center design that still allows for a big screen but makes for a large right-sided bezel. Amazon argues it delivers a better reading experience and made clear that it didn’t sacrifice much width to deliver it: The device is 4.8 inches wide, compared with 4.5-inch width of the Kindle Voyage.

There’s little debating that the Kindle Oasis is light and highly mobile. In fact, the device weighs up to just 4.7 ounces and measures 0.13 inches at its thinnest point. Amazon says it built the Kindle Oasis to be a device people could carry with them wherever they go. Based on its size and weight, it appears to have achieved that goal.

The Kindle Oasis comes with a 6-inch screen with 300 pixels per inch, nearly doubling the 167 pixels per inch in the standard Kindle model. In addition, the screen supports full multitouch and has 60 percent more LEDs than any other Kindle, improving screen brightness and the ability to read in heavily lit environments. It will also work well in low-light environments.

So, why did Amazon go with an unconventional design in the Kindle Oasis? The company clearly believes e-reader owners want to read content with one hand. The right-sided bezel is wide to accommodate page up and down buttons, so users can hold the device with one hand and still flip pages. In addition, the Oasis’ right side is thicker, making it easier to hold and less likely to slip out of a person’s hand.

As noted, Amazon’s central goal with hardware is to capture more customers for its other services. Users will be able to access the company’s Kindle ebook store from the device. In addition, Amazon offers access to a service called Kindle Unlimited, which allows users to read as many books as they want for a monthly fee of $9.99, rather than forcing them to buy individual books. Add that to the parental controls built into the $2.99-per-month Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, and Amazon is decidedly trying to get Oasis customers caught up in its sphere.

The Kindle Oasis gives customers the option of solely connecting to the Internet via WiFi or adding in 3G connectivity. Amazon’s WiFi-only model will connect to any wireless network or WiFi hotspot. Customers who buy a 3G model won’t have to pay for a plan and can connect to wireless networks at no additional charge. But the 3G model is $70 more expensive than the WiFi-only version.

Amazon isn’t forcing customers to read ebooks from the Oasis. If customers end up buying an ebook on the Oasis, they can pick up where they left off in apps on iOS, Android and other platforms. Amazon’s Kindle e-reader apps are quite popular, and they’ve become nice alternatives to traditional e-reader hardware. It’s nice to see Amazon offering synchronized data access across its software and hardware.

Amazon is somewhat coy about the storage capacity built into the Kindle Oasis, but that doesn’t mean users should worry too much about storage. According to the company, the Kindle Oasis will be capable of holding “thousands of books,” though Amazon doesn’t say exactly how many. As long as the owner isn’t an obsessive book collector, the Kindle Oasis should accommodate most collections.

In what may prove to be upsetting to startups that build Kindle covers, Amazon says that its Oasis will come with a leather charging cover. The case will have two jobs: protect the Oasis and provide juice to read ebooks. The Oasis will use the juice in the case first and then rely on the battery built into the e-reader to allow users to keep reading. When plugged in, both the case and the Oasis batteries are charged. Together, the “dual-battery charging system” will offer “months of battery life,” Amazon says.

The Kindle Oasis comes with a confusing price tag. The device starts at $290, making it notably more expensive than earlier Kindles. And that price is for the WiFi-only version with Amazon’s “special offers”—ads that the company displays on the device’s lock screen. If users don’t want those special offers, they’ll need to pay an additional $20. Plus, customers looking for the WiFi-plus-3G model will be charged $70 more. So, it’s possible certain customers could spend nearly $400 for the Kindle Oasis when all is said and done.