Kindle Oasis: Amazon's thinnest, lightest, priciest ebook reader

Amazon's new Kindle Oasis ebook reader is predictably smaller, lighter and with longer battery life.

More of a surprise, though, is that battery life now stretches from weeks to months – and the price tag seems to have grown accordingly, hitting a solid $449.

That's a lot of money for an ebook reader – but then, the Oasis is a lot of Kindle.

Amazon proudly trumpets that the Oasis is 30% thinner and at 131 grams more than 20% lighter than any other Kindle, and it's not as if anybody was complaining those ebook readers were too big and too heavy in the first place.

The overall design also changes from the Kindle's traditional cut.

You still get that crisp 6 inch (15.3cm) touchscreen of the Kindle Paperwhite making for a relaxing reading experience, even when sitting in a darkened business class cabin during an overnight flight.

(And being a front-lit screen makes it a doddle to read ebooks on the Oasis in bright sunlight – try doing that with the backlit display of your average tablet.)

The display area itself is a razor-thin 3.4mm because the electronics and battery are housed in a thicker portion of the chassis offset to the right...

... which also mimics the spine of a hardback book in the way your hand grips it for balance.

Pages are turned by tapping the touchscreen or the physical buttons on the side of the screen. The Oasis detects if you're using your left or right hand on the screen, automatically rotating the page (and buttons) accordingly.

And that camel-like battery life? While the Oasis' inbuilt battery tuns for two weeks, the device comes with a removable high-capacity 'charging cover' which will recharge that battery when it runs low – and keep recharging it again and again for up to seven weeks in toto.

End result: you could go for two months without hooking the Oasis into an AC or USB power socket.

And when you do, fast-charge technology will see 10 minutes of juice add an extra hour to the recharge capacity.

The cover itself is made of high-quality leather with a magnetic closure and wakes the Oasis once opened. The way it wraps snug around the Oasis not only protects the screen but makes the device look somewhat like a real book.

As always, books can be bought and downloaded directly from the Amazon store over any handy WiFi network – and that's your only option, as the Kindles still don't recognise the popular ePub format sold by most online bookstores and used by most other eBook readers and tablets.

The Kindle Oasis tops the rest of Amazon's ebook family, which begins with the basic but still excellent value $109 Kindle; hits mid-ground with the popular and sharp-screened $179 Kindle Paperwhite; then parks in at the $299 mark with the high-res high-contrast Kindle Voyage.

The Kindle Oasis should see Aussie release by early May and is available for pre-order at www.amazon.com.au/kindleoasis.

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David Flynn

David Flynn is the Editor-in-Chief of Executive Traveller and a bit of a travel tragic with a weakness for good coffee, shopping and lychee martinis.