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The Kindle Voyage is Still the Best 6-inch Kindle

September 19, 2020 by Nathan 38 Comments

Amazon released the Kindle Voyage back in November 2014, and to this day it’s still the best 6-inch ebook reader that Amazon has released. It has the best screen and the nicest design. Some even consider it the best Kindle ever because they don’t like the asymmetrical design of the Kindle Oasis.

How often does a company release a product that was better 6 years ago than what they offer today? It’s pretty strange when you think about it.

I’ll admit, I didn’t love the Kindle Voyage when it first came out. The first one I got had a really blotchy frontlight with a distracting gradient. But some years back I picked up a used Kindle Voyage on eBay that was in like new condition and it has a much better frontlight than the first one I had.

Of all the ebook readers that have been released since 2014, I still choose to use the Kindle Voyage when I’m away from the house because the streamlined design fits in a pocket easier than the Kindle Oasis, and the reason I like the Kindle Voyage better than other 6-inch ereaders is the fact that the screen is super crisp and clear—something that hasn’t been replicated since frontlight and capacitive touchscreen layers started degrading the clarity of E Ink screens.

Back before frontlights and capacitive touchscreens were a common feature on ebook readers, E Ink screens had an exceptionally clear quality to them, where the text almost appeared to float above the background, even on lower resolution screens. Unfortunately those days are long gone now that everything has touchscreens and frontlights, but something about the Kindle Voyage’s screen made it appear clearer than others, despite having a glass layer over the screen.

Another thing I like about the Kindle Voyage is the page sensor buttons along each side of the screen. I don’t like having to readjust my thumb with every page turn so having a button to press down on is essential for me.

The only thing I don’t like about the Voyage is the bezels are so narrow it’s impossible for my thumb not to inadvertently interact with the touchscreen. Luckily when using a cover it adds just enough thickness to the side so I can use the buttons without activating the touchscreen (it would be nice if the Voyage had the ability to disable the touchscreen like newer models).

I find it odd that I’d still rather use a Kindle Voyage that’s six years old over any of the newer 6-inch Kindles and other 6-inch models. I do like the physical page buttons on the Kindle Oasis better, and I do find it a bit more comfortable to hold with the asymmetrical design, but the portability factor takes a hit because it’s too wide to comfortably fit in a pocket, and the Voyage still has slightly better contrast and better battery life.

Who else still prefers using a Kindle Voyage after all these years? It’s a shame Amazon never released a newer version, and it’s been so long since the Voyage was produced they can only be found used these days. Even all the refurbished stock has dried up.

Reader Interactions

September 19, 2020 at 9:27 am

My Voyage’s battery is getting weaker after almost 6 years. Nothing bad, it will last for another 4-5 years with a bit of luck. That butterfly cover, as you said, add just enough on the sides. And it’s the best thing to have to put your Kindle on the table on an airplane. I actually don’t appreciate the buttons on the sides. I still automatically touch the screen to turn a page. Overall I totally agree with you and I even wrote to Amazon: it is the best Kindle of all!

September 20, 2020 at 6:04 pm

There is a YouTube video on replacing the battery on the Kindle Voyage. https://youtu.be/zFqBrIE4mT0

September 20, 2020 at 6:05 pm

I still have the Voyage and is still great.

September 19, 2020 at 11:13 am

I think it’s the best 6 inch Kindle when the light is turned off. Deep pitch black inky fonts, slim sexy design with nice curves. Light in the handle yet with a premium feel. However, the lack of uniformity with the lighting was what destroyed it’s potential. Throughout the years I’ve had 13 voyages, and they all had terrible lighting.

September 19, 2020 at 10:18 pm

Interesting. I have only had one Kindle Voyage. The lighting and screen were perfect from the start and it’s still great six years later. I have had no problems at all with it.

September 21, 2020 at 2:55 am

“Throughout the years I’ve had 13 voyages, and they all had terrible lighting.”

That’s persistence.

September 19, 2020 at 12:33 pm

I agree with everything you said. Unfortunately I managed to break my glass, so it’s basically a beautiful brick now. I would likely have replaced it with another Voyage if I could have, using the $5+20% trade-in. But since the Voyage was no longer available, I moved to a Kobo Libra specifically because of what you said about the narrow bezel and I did also want the orange light.

September 19, 2020 at 5:55 pm

I have three of them in various parts of my house and vastly prefer the Voyage over the Oasis.

September 19, 2020 at 2:24 pm

This is why I’ve not replaced my voyage. Some of the features on newer kindles are tempting (especially the waterproofing), bit they just don’t have the same form factor and functionality of the voyage with its ‘buttons’ and slim size.

September 19, 2020 at 2:36 pm

It really was nice. That said, it’s also the only kindle I’ve owned that ever randomly died (annoyingly out of warranty). Along with the risky light situation, it seems like the design had its issues.

September 19, 2020 at 5:52 pm

love my voyage. bought it used from amazon for about $60 when i lost my kobo clara. wish they’d do a re-release

September 21, 2020 at 1:14 am

In 2014 I bought my son a lightly used 7th generation Kindle. For his 11th birthday this summer I upgraded him to the current 2018 Paperwhite since he wore out the old one. He loves the upgrade. I expected to envy him that shiny new device since my beloved Voyage is indeed 5 years old. However, I find I just don’t and much prefer my “dinosaur” with its beautifully clear text and page turn buttons. I hope it lasts many more years!

I do suggest to anyone who has loves their Voyage and has considered getting a new case that they do so sooner than later. My choices were surprisingly slim compared to when I last looked.

September 19, 2020 at 5:59 pm

I loved my kindle voyage.. I used it constantly – – I read 10 hours a night at least. However, just a couple of months ago I could no longer charge it. The charger wouldn’t make a connection to charge it up. So I’m now back to my original paperwhite, which I’ve not used since I bought my Voyage – – when it first came out. (I do keep all devices charged up whether being used or not).

September 20, 2020 at 2:31 am

10 hours a night? Do you have a job? 😂

September 20, 2020 at 12:53 pm

I am retired! I climb into bed at 10 and usually read til at least 6. But I read some during the day. Sleep in the morning. Retirement, quarantine, and living alone mean my own schedule!

November 17, 2020 at 10:22 pm

Sign me up! This is the life I want :).

April 28, 2021 at 2:38 pm

I love my Voyage. I’ve had it since 2014…. I do not want physical buttons, that’s one of the things I love about it. Also the Oasis being asymmetrical drives me crazy to look at. Not sure if it would be super distracting to me…..

September 19, 2020 at 9:20 pm

Best ebook reader made for sure. Great size. Great battery. Love the haptic feedback on page turn. Love the forward and back buttons on both sides of bezel. Just an outstanding design.

Love mine. Use it everyday. Considered getting a larger screen but the clarity of text is impossible to beat on the voyager.

September 19, 2020 at 10:13 pm

I still prefer the Kindle Voyage as well.

September 19, 2020 at 11:57 pm

I wonder why Amazon cannot consider producing an 8 or 10 inch voyage kindle with buttons on. That would be my dream cone true….

September 19, 2020 at 11:58 pm

a typo – come not cone.

September 20, 2020 at 2:11 am

I loved my Voyage too but I lent it to my sister so my nephew could use it and they still have it. I was trying the new basic Kindle at the time and didn’t go back. I would love if Amazon brought it back out I much prefer either the page turn sensors or the buttons. The Oasis is a bit pricey for me to upgrade just to have the buttons but I would consider it on the cheaper Kindles.

September 20, 2020 at 4:29 am

Own two Kindle Voyage, and still use them, swapping with a Tolino Epos (V1). Would like to see both an updated Voyage and an updated Voyage with a bigger screen.

The newer, higher end Tolinos epos 2 and vision 5 are also both asymmetric, which I hate. And the epos 2 is way to expensive. They are Kobos with a different firmware. It is ok, with some nice touches, but for normal reading there is not much difference. The bigger screen is ok for PDF, but I would prefer the Sony PRS-T1 for PDF (better software). This is also true for the Kindle Voyage.

September 20, 2020 at 5:25 am

I will leave my Voyage to the Science Museum. It is a national treasure.

Best screen of any ereader by far.

It was my first Kindle with nearly perfect lighting. There was a single bright spot. The replacement from Amazon is perfect. I just wish it was a bit warmer now that I have an Oasis to play with.

September 20, 2020 at 8:10 am

There’s a hack to turn off the touchscreen, if that’s your thing.

September 20, 2020 at 9:12 am

Agree with most here that the Kindle Voyage is the best ereader Amazon has made to-date. including the Oasis. Strongly prefer it over all the others, even newer models, and await a worthy successor. Amazon folks, I hope you’re tuned in.

September 20, 2020 at 11:01 am

I bought a Voyage for myself when I decided to make the plunge into the Kindle world. I’d gotten my wife a Paperwhite a year or two earlier and she’d loved it, but I wanted the better specs (especially lighting and screen res) of the Voyage. Loved my new reader!!! When the Oasis came out, my wife was wanting a new Kindle – and was envious of my lighting and screen res – so I got her an Oasis. I found I was envious of the larger screen … and interestingly, she didn’t like the larger screen … so we traded. We both love our respective devices. I think anyone who complains about either (other than pricing) must’ve gotten a bad unit!!!

September 20, 2020 at 12:07 pm

The voyage had light uniformity problems. I believe Nathan has also mentioned it throughout the years and on YouTube videos. Very sleek device and aesthetically pleasing. They should do a re-release in an 8 inch form factor. Hopefully they could get the lighting right this time.

September 20, 2020 at 3:17 pm

Kindle Voyage that I have is my “go to” e reader. Love the portability.

September 20, 2020 at 8:30 pm

I’m hanging on to my Voyage as long as possible. It is my favorite also.

September 21, 2020 at 2:47 am

Nice to get your points of view.

September 22, 2020 at 9:38 pm

I love my Kindle Voyage!

September 23, 2020 at 10:33 am

I have and still use Kindle Voyage. I would really like a larger screen and no glass screen for an updated model. Or perhaps a new e-reader with a larger screen and symmetrical buttons. I doubt Amazon will do this, though.

November 5, 2020 at 7:27 am

I still use a Voyage everyday. Battery life is still much better than my Oasis, and as others mentioned the portability makes it my travelling reader. But most of all, the Voyage does really have the best screen; ?I bought one in 2016, 2 years after its release and I think all the kinks in its initial production runs were smoothed over to provide a flawless screen and excellent lighting.

I still like the amber glow of the Oasis for nighttime reading and keep it handy near my bed, and as both devices synch flawlessly, I really enjoy reading from both.

January 14, 2021 at 1:56 pm

Yep, I prefer Kindle Voyage. Just bought a used one in very good condition when mine died. Text is sharper on this screen than on the Oasis.

January 8, 2022 at 9:02 am

If my Voyage ever dies I’ll strongly consider an Oasis but when my 2014 one died suddenly in 2017 I tried a Kindle non voyage again and within weeks was looking for another Voyage . I found a “used like new ” one and have been averaging about 2 hours a week since then. I only get about 2 weeks of battery life before I need to charge it but for being getting on 5 years old AND was used prior I’m ecstatic . The leather vertical flip cover (igadgitz brand ) is well worn but still does the trick with its hand hold on the back . With the new paperwhite and paperwhite signature being released with just about all the bells and whistles hopefully the next paperwhite will have side buttons like my Voyage , the biggest reason I prefer it over all others .

May 13, 2023 at 11:33 pm

In 2023, the Kindle Voyage still has the sharpest, best screen of all e-book readers manufactured since 2014. Especially reading at night, Kindle Voyage is simply the clearest screen. All the others, even 5 times more expensive, are fuzzy compared to Voyage. I can live without buttons or other bells, but when you mess up the screen sharpness to acomodate the useless yellow light technology… that is a dealbreaker for me.

May 26, 2023 at 7:40 pm

What a cool little support forum for the Voyage! Maybe if someone could tell Amazon to check out this thread, we’d have a new Voyage soon! Anyway, ditto everyone- I love my Voyage (although I might try to install a new battery- fingers crossed). I’ve never had issues with the light, I love the side buttons, and my little leather cover makes it the perfect portable hand-hold! Seriously- if Amazon saw this and used our feedback, they’d have a brand new 6″ winner to sell.

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Amazon Kindle Voyage Review

Laptop mag verdict.

Featuring a brighter and sharper backlit E-Ink display and new touch controls, the Amazon Kindle Voyage is the sleekest e-reader yet.

Premium materials and construction

Smart and even front light

Helpful parental controls

Physical page turn buttons

Shorter battery life than the competition

Why you can trust Laptop Mag Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test .

While all its other e-readers cost less than $150, Amazon is going upscale with the Kindle Voyage. This $200 device has a sleek new design, a brighter, crisper e-Ink display, and a fancy new page-turning method. Plus, it's got access to Amazon's huge library of inexpensive content. But, at $80 more than other e-readers, such as the Amazon Paperwhite, is the Voyage worth the trip?

Click to Enlarge The Amazon Kindle Voyage looks downright sexy; it's sleek, thin and lightweight. While it's a basic black rectangle with rounded corners--the same shape as the Paperwhite--a reinforced glass screen covers the front of the device, with a black bezel surrounding the E Ink screen.

Along the right and left bezels is a dot with a line beneath. These ingeniously serve as Amazon's new "physical" buttons, called PagePress, which are pressure-sensitive and also provide haptic feedback. Pressing the line will flip a book to the next page, and pressing the dot will take you back.

The rear of the Voyage is made of a single piece of magnesium for a durable and classy look. Each edge is angled up and out, reminiscent of the Amazon Fire tablet's design. The only actual button you'll see is the power button on the top right.

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The Voyage weighs just 6.3 ounces (Wi-Fi only), and measures 6.4 x 4.5 x 0.3 inches. The $119 Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (6.7 x 4.6 x 0.4 inches; 7.3 ounces) and the Nook GlowLight (6.5 x 5 x 0.42 inches; 6.2 ounces) are both bigger and heavier.

Click to Enlarge  Side by side, text was crisp and clear on the Voyage, and easier on the eyes than the Paperwhite or GlowLight.

But Amazon's enhancements don't stop there. The flush front glass that covers the Voyage's front is micro-etched to reduce glare and feel more like a printed page. In bright light we didn't notice many reflections.

Like the Paperwhite, the Voyage also uses Amazon's front-light technology, which lets you read in the dark. Using our lightmeter, the Voyage measured a bright 496 lux, nearly identical to the GlowLight's 490 lux, and far brighter than the Paperwhite's 333 lux. Not only was it the brightest, but of the three, the Voyage also offered the most even lighting.

The light on the Voyage isn't just bright, it's smart. In the light's controls you can set the light to auto adjust based on the ambient light around you. In my well-lit living room, it auto adjusted to 9, but when I stepped outside on a bright day, the display auto-adjusted to 16. Plus, when it's time to read in bed, the light will gradually dim itself over an hour or so, as your eyes adjust to the light and you prepare to sleep.

User Interface

Click to Enlarge The Kindle's interface is as easy to navigate as always. The home screen lists recently viewed or downloaded titles as thumbnail images of the book covers. The top bar houses a series of icons for home, back, light, shopping, search, Goodreads and settings. This navigation bar can follow you into the content as you read it, but only as a drop-down menu when you tap the top of the page.

Just below the menu bar on the home page, you can toggle between your Amazon library of content in the cloud or what's on the device. Content can be sorted by type, title, author and most recently received. The second row of thumbnail images shows book recommendations. You can swipe across either row to advance the lists of books and magazines.

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The menu button reveals options to shop, view ads, change to List View, create a content collection, check for new items, tweak the settings and open the browser. Interestingly, you can also set to read in landscape mode, instead of portrait.

Within a book, the menu options include displaying book or author descriptions. You can sync to the furthest page read, bookmark and open notes. Within a periodical, this bar allows you to "Clip This Article" for reading later.

The menu button also houses a couple new additions. FreeTime is Amazon's parental controls, extended even to e-readers. You can create profiles for up to four children in your family, which allows you to block access to the Kindle store, Web browser, Wikipedia and social sharing.

Reading Experience

Click to Enlarge When viewing Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, the Voyage offered sharper text and crisper images than either the Paperwhite or the GlowLight. Page turns were instantaneous and pretty much identical to the Kindle Paperwhite.

Although I've always preferred buttons to tapping or swiping, I found PagePress easy to use. In the settings, you can manually adjust both the amount of pressure required to turn a page and the amount of haptic feedback you get from pressing. You can also turn the page by tapping or swiping on the display. It also made the e-reader comfortable to hold with one hand. Simply holding my finger over the button didn't advance the pages on accident.

Amazon also adds some unique features to enhance the reading experience on all its e-readers.

As you're reading, if you press and hold on a word, a pop-up window will appear with options for the Dictionary, X-Ray and Wikipedia. Amazon's Vocabulary Builder will remember what words you pressed, and at any point, you can look up the words and test yourself (or your child) with flashcards.

X-Ray offers a CliffsNotes-like experience of a book, letting you know at a glance how often and where in a book a specific character or term appears. For example, using X-Ray when reading  The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, I could easily see that Bilbo Baggins Esquire dominates the book, but Gollum only appears in two sections.

Upcoming Features

Amazon plans to roll out an update this fall that will add more features to this already impressive e-reader. Word Wise, designed for those who are learning to read, automatically displays very short and simple definitions above difficult words. You can adjust how the device determines the difficulty level of the words by moving a slider.

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Family Library solves one of my biggest gripes since the beginning of e-readers: the inability to easily share content across a family. Coming soon, you'll be able to link two adults' accounts. That means you'll have access to your e-books as well as your partner's.

Click to Enlarge The Voyage's on-screen keyboard features small square keys. Tapping one causes it to blink black for a moment, which is a bit distracting. The predictive typing feature helped compensate for errors, but I wish the keys offered haptic feedback. The lag in keeping up with my typing is noticeable, so don't expect to compose long messages or notes.

Kindle Content

Click to Enlarge Amazon's e-book library is best-in-class. The e-tailer offers millions of books, newspapers and magazines, as well as a huge library of exclusive titles (600,000). It also offers the best prices around. Among the most recent top 10 e-book fiction bestsellers, as listed by The New York Times, Amazon charged an average of $10, compared with $10.47 for Barnes & Noble and $12.19 for Kobo e-books.

Amazon also boasts more than 1 million titles for $4.99 or less and millions of out-of-copyright books for free. Anyone can download and read the first chapters of a book for free via Amazon's Sample feature. But if you subscribe to the Amazon Prime membership service (a one-month free trial followed by $99 per year), you can borrow from among hundreds of thousands of e-books. You get access to only one book at a time, but there are no due dates.

As an avid reader, I love the Kindle Matchbook feature. Through Matchbook you can purchase Kindle editions of Amazon print books you purchased as far back as 2007, for $2.99 or less. Also, Amazon now offers a Kindle First program where you can access one e-book a month ahead of its official release date. For Prime members this is free, otherwise it costs $1.99 per month.

Like Barnes & Noble and Kobo, Amazon lets users lend some Kindle books to other Kindle or Kindle app users. Eligible books -- those marked as Lending Enabled -- can be lent for up to 14 days. Recipients have seven days to accept, or the book is returned to your archives.

Non-Kindle Content

Outside the Amazon world, the Kindle supports TXT, PDF, DOC, DOCX, MOBI, PRC and HTML formats. That means you can download millions of free, out-of-copyright books from such sources as archive.org. The Kindle can also read JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP image files.

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Public libraries are also accessible from the new Kindle. E-books from more than 10,000 local institutions retain Kindle features such as notes and highlights. And when your e-book checkout expires, you can check it out again or buy it from the Kindle store.

Click to Enlarge Amazon's experimental browser on its e-readers is still as bare-bones as ever. From the home page Menu button, you're presented with a page of bookmarks that includes Amazon, Google.com, Yahoo and NYTimes.com. It look 11 seconds to load Laptopmag.com over a Wi-Fi connection, 14 seconds to load NYTimes.com and 12 seconds to load ESPN.com. We wouldn't recommend using this browser for Web searches, as it was buggy and there were a lot of flashes on the screen.

Battery Life

The Voyage should last up to six weeks, according to Amazon. That claim is based on a half hour of reading per day with wireless off and the light setting at a low 10. That's two weeks less than what is promised by the Amazon Paperwhite and the Nook GlowLight.

Configurations

Click to Enlarge Our review unit of the Kindle Voyage, which came with 3G built in and without ads on the lock screen, costs $269. If you can do without the ads and are happy with Wi-Fi only, you'll pay $199. That's still a pretty far cry from the Kindle Paperwhite, which costs just $119 and has many of the same features.

Bottom Line

Real bookworms know E Ink is the way to go when it comes to e-readers. And in the world of e-readers, the $199 Kindle Voyage is the best device yet. I love the glare-free, glass display, smart lighting and the PagePress page-turning buttons. For $80 less, you can pick up the Kindle Paperwhite, offers the same parental control features, and a front light for nighttime reading. But if you demand the very best reading experience and are willing to pay for it, the Voyage is simply fantastic.

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Kindle Voyage Review

Kindle voyage.

The e-reader that shines the brightest

• Outstanding screen
• Reliable backlight
• Intuitive controls

Key Specifications

• Review Price: £169.00
• 6-inch high-resolution display
• Built-in light with adaptive lighting system
• Pressure-sensitive bezels
• 1GHz processor
• 4GB of onboard storage
• Six-week battery life

What is the Amazon Kindle Voyage?

The Kindle Voyage is Amazon’s top-of-the-range e-reader. Like the excellent Kindle Paperwhite , the Voyage has a 6-inch backlit touchscreen, but its screen is sharper and clearer. The Kindle Voyage is also slightly thinner and lighter, supports a clever new origami case and adds new ‘haptic’ controls for turning pages. At £169, it’s also £60 dearer than the Paperwhite. Is that too much?

For existing Paperwhite owners, yes: the Paperwhite’s still a fine e-reader, after all. But if you have an older Kindle then the Voyage is an outstanding upgrade. Is it expensive? Certainly, but it’s also the very best there is and will stand the test of time.

Amazon Kindle Voyage video review

Amazon kindle voyage – screen.

In isolation, it’s easy to wonder why you would spend this much on a Kindle when a tablet like the Tesco Hudl 2 is available for less and ‘does more’. It’s a perfectly reasonable argument to make and, if your requirements lean towards a tablet, you shouldn’t give the Kindle Voyage a second thought – you may want to consider the Kindle Fire HD 6 or any of our best cheap tablets . But if you’re mainly interested in reading then the Voyage’s outstanding screen is worth the entrance fee alone.

Like the Paperwhite, the Kindle Voyage has a 6-inch backlit display, but it improves on it in a couple of important ways. One, it has more pixels, which makes it sharper; two, the backlight automatically adjusts to select the right level for the ambient light. These two qualities and the anti-glare nature of an e-ink screen make reading on the Kindle Voyage a pleasure that no tablet can match.

How much sharper is the Kindle Voyage? At 300ppi (pixels per inch), it’s about as sharp as most ‘retina’ phones or tablets and around 35 per cent sharper than the Kindle Paperwhite. The difference is noticeable, particularly as it means you can read smaller text with greater comfort. More so than ever, reading on the Kindle Voyage feels just like a book or newspaper. If you’ve previously resisted e-readers on account of fuzziness, the Voyage may well convert you.

The adaptive brightness, meanwhile, is a subtle but brilliant addition. The main benefit is that it selects the right brightness for the conditions. You could do this manually, but the automatic system works very well and it’s one less distraction from remaining absorbed in your book. It also smartly changes the brightness very gradually, so you don’t get distracting jumps. This is equally true when switching from bright light to complete darkness, as the Night Light setting gradually reduces the brightness as your eyes become accustomed to darkness.

The Kindle Voyage really comes into its own when reading in the dark. You notice the sharper text all the more and you suffer none of the eye-strain that tablet a generates even at its lowest brightness setting. And, of course, when outdoors the Kindle is in a completely different league – nothing new there.

Amazon Kindle Voyage – Design

The Kindle Voyage looks and feels great, though the differences between it and the Paperwhite are subtle. It’s marginally slimmer and lighter, but marginally is the word, while the rear adopts the same two-tone gloss and soft-touch finish as the Kindle Fire tablet range. It’s fine, but nothing to get excited about.

More interesting are the new PagePress controls, which mimic the physical controls of older Kindles but using pressure-sensitive ‘haptics’ instead. This means you never have to move your hand, as you simply squeeze the edge where your hand already rests to turn the page.

Opinions vary on how useful the PagePress buttons are, but we really like them. They’re more convenient than tapping the screen each time, but they don’t disrupt the smooth lines of the Kindle’s frame. The only tricky problem is that they’re slightly hard to locate in the dark, but their location soon becomes second nature and you can still resort to tapping the screen.

The touchscreen itself is pleasantly responsive, though the e-ink screen still isn’t slick enough to emulate the speed and responsiveness of a tablet. We much prefer the smooth finish of the Kindle Voyage’s display, though. The Paperwhite’s slightly recessed screen has an unpleasant coarse texture, but the Kindle Voyage’s is smooth. It’s a small detail, but it’s another that makes the Kindle Voyage nicer to use.

Other things to consider

Battery life is an historical strength of Kindles, albeit one reduced by the introduction of backlights. Amazon claims up to six weeks when used 30 minutes per day with wireless turned off and the backlight set to 10. We found four weeks is a more realistic figure for a regular reader.

As with most recent Kindles, the Voyage doesn’t have a headphone jack, so it doesn’t support audio books. We don’t feel this is a huge problem, though, as a phone or MP3 player are a more convenient means of listening to them.

Format is another thorny issue for some, as the Kindle Voyage doesn’t support ePub books from other stores. Existing Kindle owners will have made their peace with this long ago, but if you’d rather not be locked into Amazon’s ecosystem – excellent though it is – then nothing has changed here.

Finally, Amazon has introduced new cases for the Voyage, priced from £35 up to £55 for the leather version. The main feature is the folding ‘origami’ stand, which is perfect for propping on tray tables. It’s also magnetic – it clips on magnetically and the front cover automatically wakes and sleeps the Kindle when opened.

Should I buy the Amazon Kindle Voyage?

We’d prefer it if the Amazon Kindle Voyage were £20 cheaper – it feels expensive. But it’s also an outstanding product and the very best e-reader on the market. The screen is great, the PagePress system is a small but useful improvement, and the Amazon Kindle ecosystem remains incredibly strong.

This is also the first e-reader that really looks as crisp and readable as a real book. Add in the benefits for night-time reading and the convenience that the Kindle Voyage affords, and it’s a great choice for anyone for whom reading is their favourite pastime.

The ultimate e-reader for the serious bookworm, though some will be put off by the price.

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Amazon Kindle Voyage review: Amazon's second best e-reader

Although it's pricey, the Kindle Voyage's slim design, sharper display and even better lighting make it an attractive high-end e-book reader.

• Maggie Award for Best Regularly Featured Web Column/Consumer

In recent years, Amazon's mantra for its tablets and e-readers has been to build "premium products at nonpremium prices." So it surprised some people when the company went ahead and built a premium e-reader, the Kindle Voyage, for a pretty premium price. It starts at $199 in the US and £169 in the UK for the Wi-Fi version.

Amazon Kindle Voyage

The bottom line.

A step-up version with "free" 3G is also available for $269 or £229. In the US, both models require an additional $20 charge to remove the embedded ads on the home screen and lock screen (in the UK, there is no cheaper ad-supported version). The Voyage is available for preorder now, and ships the week of November 23 in the US and November 4 in the UK.

In Australia, the Voyage has just gone on sale as of May 1, 2015. Only the Wi-Fi version is available and it's going to cost you a rather large AU$299. Amazon has no current plans to bring the 3G Voyage into Australia.

The Voyage isn't a huge upgrade over the existing Kindle Paperwhite ($119, £109 and AU$179 for the Wi-Fi version), which remains on sale with a bump from 2GB to 4GB of memory. But it's a little slimmer, measuring 7.6mm thick and weighing less than 181 grams (the Paperwhite weighs 206 grams). It also has an improved lighting system, and its higher-resolution screen is a little sharper, with better contrast.

Kindle Voyage product photos

Simply put, the Voyage is the best Kindle I've used to date. But is it worth the $80 or £60 premium over the Paperwhite?

If you're already a satisfied Paperwhite owner -- or if you only use an e-reader sparingly -- the answer is probably no. But if you're an avid everyday reader, check the yes box -- and know that you're getting the latest and greatest e-reader, bar none.

Design changes

The Voyage is the first Kindle e-ink reader to feature a flush glass front and magnesium back. It uses a new 6-inch Carta E Ink HD touchscreen display, with pixel density of 300 pixels per inch (ppi). Like the Paperwhite, the Voyage uses capacitive touch technology, not the older infrared-based touch technology of the entry-level Kindle 2014 .

Its display stack uses "chemically strengthened glass" too, which Amazon says is designed to resist scratches. On top of that, Amazon says the cover glass is micro-etched to diffuse light and reduce glare, which sounds pretty high-tech. From my time using the Voyage both indoors and in direct sunlight, the micro-etching does seem to help, but that doesn't mean you won't encounter some glare.

In some ways the Voyage resembles the Kobo Aura , which weighs 174 grams and has a flush glass front and similar specs (1GHz processor, 4GB of memory, built-in light). There's also the new $180/£140 Kobo Aura H2O -- a 6.8-inch waterproof e-reader that sports a Carta E Ink HD touchscreen similar to the Voyage's (in this case with 1,430x1,080-pixel resolution, at 265 ppi) and has expandable storage, too. But the Voyage is sleeker. And, of course, it has access to Amazon's extensive e-book ecosystem, while the Kobo can use "open" epub files.

The Kindle Voyage features Amazon's sharpest screen in an e-ink e-reader, with a flush glass panel.

Thanks to the flush-glass design, the Voyage's touchscreen is allegedly a tad more responsive than the Paperwhite's, but I didn't notice a significant difference. When you compare the screens side by side, however, you can see that the Voyage's screen is a little sharper -- it's easy to spot in book covers but is also noticeable in text, particularly small text -- and the contrast is a little better, with blacks appearing more black than dark gray.

The light at its highest setting is clearly brighter -- Amazon says 39 percent brighter -- and the screen appears whiter. Look closely and you'll also see that the light splays across the screen more uniformly, though it's still not absolutely perfect, leaving room for some small improvements in the next model.

What's also new is that the light can be set to adjust automatically based on the light in your environment. You can, as always, opt to adjust the lighting manually, but I suspect most people will just go with the automatic setting and not think about it too much. Additionally, you can enable the "Nightlight" feature, which Amazon says "gradually reduces the screen brightness over time as your eyes adjust to the darkness."

Another new addition is a set of pressure-sensitive page-turn buttons on either side of the bezel. You keep your thumb resting on the button and then press lightly to make the page turn forward or back, depending on whether you touch the top or bottom button. You also get a some haptic feedback -- a slight buzz on your finger -- with each page turn. Amazon calls the new feature PagePress and it works well.

That said, I personally prefer to simply touch the sides of the screen to turn pages -- yes, you can still do that -- but an apparently vocal subset of the e-reading population likes to press physical buttons, so we now have PagePress.

The Kindle Paperwhite (left) next to the Kindle Voyage (right).

All the new e-ink Kindles are powered by a 1GHz processor and 4GB of built-in storage with no expansion (although that 4GB allows you to store thousands of e-books and other documents). The Voyage has 1GB of RAM compared with the 500MB of the step-down models, which makes this device a tad zippier. However, since e-ink is inherently sluggish, the device just isn't anywhere as speedy or responsive as the latest iPads or Android tablets.

It's worth mentioning that no AC adapter is included with the e-reader -- just a USB cable -- but most people have a USB charger already for their phone or tablet. No case is included either and it's probably a good idea to get one, particularly since this model costs so much. Amazon makes a really well-designed Origami Case -- I recommend it -- but it is rather pricey, starting at $45 or £40 (the leather model costs $60 or £55). Other more affordable case options will be available eventually.

The back of the device, with the power button on the left side near the top.

Battery life is rated at six weeks, based on a half hour of reading per day with wireless off. That's less than the Paperwhite's eight weeks (it appears that more power is required to drive the higher-resolution display or Amazon shaved the battery down to get the weight of the device down -- or a combination of the two). But at this point, with battery life measured in weeks rather than hours, that reduced battery rating shouldn't be a serious issue.

Some competitors, including Kobo, have made efforts to reduce the amount of flashing the screen does to clear e-ink's slight ghosting effect as you turn pages. With the Voyage I ended up turning around 14 pages before the screen would refresh (that number was pretty consistent). Most people don't mind too much when the screen blinks, but it does bother some readers.

The device charges via Micro-USB. A USB cable is included but no AC adapter.

I'm not going to dig too deep into the Voyage's Kindle features and interface, but the platform continues to mature and add new features. The kid-friendly Kindle FreeTime and Vocabulary Builder (words you look up are automatically added) are now on all of Amazon's e-ink Kindles, and Amazon has enhanced its X-Ray ("bones of the book") feature too. Goodreads, the social reading and reviews site that Amazon bought last year , has been integrated.

As with other e-readers, you can also borrow e-books from your local library. And Amazon's daily, weekly and monthly deals ensure that there is always a huge number of e-books available for as little as $2 or 99p -- just don't expect them to necessarily be from mainstream authors that you've heard of.

To cut a long story short, the Amazon ecosystem remains far superior to alternatives from Barnes & Noble, Apple and Kobo.

You may balk at the price of the Voyager, especially with Amazon selling the Fire HD 6 tablet for half the price. But there's been a movement lately by companies such as Kobo toward creating higher-end e-readers with higher-resolution displays that sell for more. They're targeted at heavy readers who want the best dedicated e-reader available. And that's exactly what the Kindle Voyage is: a great e-reader that just isn't cheap.

Score Breakdown

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Ebook Readers

Amazon kindle voyage review, the amazon kindle voyage is one of the nicest best ebook readers available, though most people will still be served just fine by the kindle paperwhite..

Bottom Line

• Incredibly sharp display.
• Adaptive front light.
• Thin design.
• Excellent ebook store.
• No memory card slot or ePub support.

Amazon's various Kindles have long been the most popular ebook readers on the market, but that doesn't mean they have always been the best from a technology perspective. Barnes & Noble beat Amazon to the punch with a front light, and Kobo eclipsed the company in screen resolution. The Kindle Voyage changes that. It has a lovely, thin design, with an incredibly sharp display and a useful adaptive front light, not to mention Amazon's excellent ebook store. That said, I'm still not sure this is enough to warrant the $199.99 price tag when you can pick up our Editors' Choice, the Kindle Paperwhite , for nearly half that amount.

Design and Display

At a glance, the Voyage ($85.22 at Amazon) doesn't look all that different from the Paperwhite or the standard-issue Kindle , in the sense that all three share the same general size and form factor. Look closer, though, and lots of important changes emerge. The Voyage measures 6.4 by 4.5 by 0.30 inches (HWD) and weighs 6.3 ounces (or 6.6 ounces for the 3G model), making it thinner and lighter than the Paperwhite (6.7 by 4.6 by 0.4 inches and 7.2 ounces for the 3G model). There's less bezel all around, and the screen has been changed from plastic to glass, making the front of the reader completely flush, rather than slightly dipped like on the other models.

The display uses scratch-resistant glass, and has been micro-etched to diffuse light, so you can read outside without any glare. The etching pattern supposedly makes the glass feel more like paper, but I think you get a better sense of this using the Kindle Paperwhite or base Kindle.

The Voyage's display has 300 pixels per inch, which looks absolutely fantastic. Text is incredibly sharp, no matter the font size, and images look great, so comics really pop (though keep in mind you're still working with a black-and-white E Ink screen). The Paperwhite matches the Voyage in resolution, but lacks an adaptive backlight (which I'll get to in a moment). The Kindle Oasis , meanwhile, gets even brighter and has the best screen overall, but also costs $100 more than the Voyage.

The Voyage's front light is adaptive, so if you select the Auto Brightness setting, it will automatically adjust based on the light around you. I love this feature. I've been using the first-generation Paperwhite since it came out, and I mostly tend to read on the subway and in coffee shops, which have vastly different lighting scenarios. I rarely adjust the lighting on my Paperwhite to compensate for this, and I didn't realize what a difference it makes until I started using the Voyage. No matter where you use it, the lighting is pretty much perfect.

Another cool feature is that Amazon claims the brightness is tuned to match the way the eye responds to darkness. So if you're reading in the dark, you'll need a brighter light at first than you will after reading for 30 minutes, so the light will slowly turn down over time. I'm slightly concerned that constantly using a light sensor will impact battery life, but then again, you might ultimately wind up using less lighting.

Aside from the glass front panel, the Voyage is made of solid magnesium, with a soft-touch finish reminiscent of the Paperwhite, which gives it a premium, classy feel (though it isn't waterproof like the Kobo Aura H2O). The power port is still on the bottom, but I'm not too fond of the decision to move the Power button to the back of the reader. It's hard to find, and it likely renders any existing case you were hoping to reuse incompatible.

If you're a real Kindle diehard, and haven't upgraded to a touch-screen model for lack of physical Page buttons, rejoice. The Voyage features PagePress, which is basically Amazon's fancy name for Page buttons on either side of the display. I'll focus on this feature more in the Reading section.

The Voyage comes with a black USB cable, but no AC adapter. Amazon claims up to six weeks of battery life based on half an hour of reading per day with wireless off and the light set to 10. That's two weeks more than the Kindle and two weeks less than the Paperwhite, all of which have plenty of time for the average reader.

The Voyage hooks into 802.11b/g/n networks, and a 3G cellular option is still available for an additional $70 extra. It comes with 4GB of storage—the same as the other two Kindles now—which should be good for over 2,000 books. Amazon also stores your purchases in the cloud, so you can retrieve content whenever you'd like, and view it on other devices. Unfortunately, even on the Voyage there's no memory card slot, so there's no way to expand storage. It also makes it a bit more challenging to sideload additional files.

For file support, the Voyage can handle Amazon's own Kindle format (AZW and AZW3), along with DOC, DOCX, HTML, MOBI, PDF, and TXT files. There's still no support for ePub files, which could make it difficult to borrow books from public libraries (though Prime users can borrow certain books for free from Amazon).

Interface and Reading

If you already own a Paperwhite or have used another Kindle, you'll be familiar with the interface on the Voyage. It's touch-based, with a row of icons at the top of the screen for Back, Cart, Home, Goodreads, Menu, and Search. The interface displays the covers of six books per page, and you can choose to view all of your books in the cloud or just the ones on your device.

If you tap anywhere near the top inch of the screen, you'll bring up the Menu bar, which has the same controls as you'll find on the home screen, along with options to adjust the font, go to a specific page, bring up X-Ray for more information on a topic, share to Facebook or Twitter, or bookmark pages. The bottom of the page shows you how much reading you have left in the book by percentage, as well as your reading progress in the form of your location or page in the book, or your time left in a chapter or the rest of the book.

You simply tap on a book to start reading. This is where things get slightly different from the other two Kindles. To turn a page, you can tap on the left or right hand side of the display to flip backwards or forwards. But you can also use one of the new PagePress buttons on either side of the display. Actually, button isn't really the right word. Essentially, PagePress is a pressure-sensitive sensor that sits directly underneath the bezel. Page forward sensors are marked by a 1.2-inch vertical gray strip, roughly at the spot your thumb sits when holding a book. Page back sensors are small gray dots located about an inch above.

All you have to do is rest your finger on the sensor and press it lightly, and you'll be able to flip to the next page or turn back. Amazon claims you can do this without lifting a finger, but that's assuming your finger lies on the sensor the entire time you're reading. The not-quite buttons deliver a satisfying response thanks to some very subtle, quiet haptic feedback. I was afraid to trigger one accidentally, but I didn't manage to do so after a few days of reading. I did, however, find PagePress to be slightly less reliable than tapping on the screen. Thinking about where I needed to tap took me out of the book, and sometimes pages wouldn't turn if I didn't apply enough pressure. I'm still pretty sure that button lovers will be pleased, but I'll stick to tapping.

As far as speed goes, I found page turns to be slightly slower than the Paperwhite when tapping the screen, but slightly faster using PagePress. Neither difference is notable, though. Overall, reading on the Voyage is hard to beat.

Kindle Store and Conclusions

Amazon's Kindle Store is better than ever. It's filled with lists and recommendations, and generally seems to have the best pricing when compared with competitors like Barnes & Noble and Kobo (over a million titles are $4.99 or less). It's easy to subscribe to magazines and newspapers, and Amazon Prime users can borrow books for free from an extensive list of titles. Amazon's Kindle Unlimited , meanwhile, is sort of like Netflix for ebooks. It gives you unlimited access to over a million titles per month for $9.99. Amazon apps for Android and iOS devices, as well as Macs and PCs, sync your book collection, so you can put down one device and pick up on the same page on another one.

Clearly, the Kindle Voyage is a fantastic ebook reader. So why doesn't it earn our Editors' Choice? It comes down to one simple factor: price. The Voyage costs $199.99 for the version with Special Offers (which are basically ads that appear on your home screen whenever the Kindle is locked, and at the bottom your home screen while in use). I happen to find the Special Offers useful for discovering new books, but if you're not a fan, you can either pay $20 to remove them, or you can buy a version without the ads up front. But that brings the already pricey Voyage well past the $200 mark. For that amount, you can pick up a nice color table.

If you were already considering a high-end reader like the Kobo Aura One , I prefer the Voyage for Amazon's content ecosystem. But while the Kindle Voyage is indeed one of the best ebook readers out there, I think most people will be perfectly happy picking up the $119.99 Paperwhite and having the extra $80 to spend on new books. Don't get me wrong: I'd be perfectly happy to use a Kindle Voyage or an even more expensive Kindle Oasis. I just probably wouldn't buy one for myself.

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About Alex Colon

I’m PCMag’s executive editor of reviews, steering our coverage to make sure we're testing the products you're interested in buying and telling you whether they're worth it. I've been here for more than 10 years. I previously managed the consumer electronics reviews team, and before that I covered mobile, smart home, and wearable technology for PCMag and Gigaom.

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Amazon Kindle Voyage review

Sharper, brighter and quicker, amazon's kindle voyage is its finest ereader yet.

“This is, without question, the best Kindle ebook reader yet. Between the improved specs and Amazon’s reading ecosystem, it’s the best E Ink reader you can buy.”

• Great Screen
• Slim Profile
• Excellent overall reading ecosystem
• No expandable storage
• More locked down ecosystem than competing readers

This time last year, Amazon seemed content to rest on its ebook reader laurels. That’s no knock against the last Kindle Paperwhite. It was a fine device, but at its heart, the reader was little more than a slight upgrade, a mostly modest refining of its predecessor’s shortcomings aimed at offering some reassurance that the company hadn’t completely abandoned the space for $200 tablets. At the time, we called it a “holding pattern.”

If nothing else, the Kindle Voyage is a sign that the ebook ship  hasn’t sailed. Amazon still has some R&D money to spend on the space, and it’s willing to gamble that big-time readers are still willing to shell out a bit of their own hard-earned money on just such a device. Lots of it, in fact. This time out, Amazon eschewed its longstanding view of the Kindle as a content delivery device, instead delivering a reader with premium specs that’s as focused on cutting-edge hardware as it is the books it’s delivering.

• The best Kindle for reading outside, at night, and more
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The Kindle Voyage is a sign that the ebook ship  hasn’t sailed.

The new Kindle also comes with a starting price of $200 — that’s a number that includes the company’s “Special Offers” (built-in advertising). Dumping that adds $20 to the price, and 3G will set you back another $70. All told, it’s a pretty sizable premium over the base Kindle’s $70 starting price. That translates to a lot of books.

A svelter Kindle

With this generation, the Kindle finally sheds its plastic bezel, following the lead of Kobo’s high-end Aura devices. The display and bezel are now one contiguous piece, which serves to not only make the reader more aesthetically pleasing, but also shaves a few precious fractions of an inch from its footprint.

The reader is noticeably smaller in each dimension, down to 6.4 x 4.5 x 0.30 inches from 6.7 x 4.6 x 0.36 inches. It was possible to slip the Paperwhite in the front pocket of a pair of jeans, but this time you can manage it with minimal maneuvering, making the reader portable. At 6.3 ounces for the Wi-Fi version and 6.6 ounces for 3G, Amazon’s also managed to shed a full ounce, just in time for fall coat season.

Even more interesting than the flush bezel is Amazon’s return to page-turn buttons. Unlike the Nook Simple Touch, the Kindle shed all of its buttons, save for power when it made the move to touchscreen. This was long a pet peeve of of mine, as a frequent one-handed subway reader (gotta be mindful of those sudden stops). Now, the company has maneuvered its way back into my good graces with the inclusion of not two, but four buttons devoted to the cause.

The touch spots are designation by dots and lines. You can either tap sides with a thumb or give them a good, hearty squeeze, the latter of which will respond with a friendly haptic buzz. Strangely, holding down on the button won’t make the pages to flip continuous, but rapidly pressing down will cause things to turn pretty fast.

The display and bezel are now one contiguous piece.

The power button has been moved to the back as well, thanks to the slimmer profile. It’s actually an ideal position for turning the device on and off while holding it in the reading position.

The back is also emblazoned with a huge Amazon logo smack dab in the middle. All-in-all, there’s a lot going on back there, and, from an aesthetic standpoint, we’d be lying if we said we weren’t partial to the simplicity of older Kindles. But let’s be honest: If you’re shelling out $200 plus a reader, you’re going to want a case for the thing, which means you likely won’t be spending a lot of time staring at the back anyway.

And really, that’s an extremely minor quibble. At its heart, the hardware is the product of a company with years of experience in a space pulling out all the stops, and it’s a lovely thing to behold.

Under the hood

Amazon never did come around on expandable storage. But while we’d certainly never turn down the option, its relative merits have become less pronounced over the years, between all of Amazon’s cloud-based storage, cross-platform syncing, and internal storage increases. A couple of months back, the company quietly doubled the Paperwhite’s storage from 2GB to 4GB and the company carried that number over to the Voyage.

That translates to 3GB of space for books. Amazon’s apparently given up on keeping track of the number of books you can store on the thing, just listing “thousands” as the number in the product’s specs. If that’s not enough, the company still has a list of every book you’ve purchased along with where you left off easily accessible in the Cloud tab on the device’s main menu.

Per usual, Amazon’s mum on processor specifics, stating that chip is “20 percent faster” this go-round. That’s compared to a 1GHz model on the second-gen Paperwhite. You’re unlikely to notice that difference while reading. Placed side by side against the last generation, there’s no discernible difference in page-turn speed. The Voyage is, on the other hand, noticeably zippier when performing bigger tasks, such as opening a book.

At this point, what you’re looking at is pretty comparable to the printed page.

Speaking of wireless, the options are the same as always: Wi-Fi and 3G. Given the $70 price difference, the base model will be plenty connected enough for most users. Frequent traveling voracious readers who really hate waiting on the other hand, might want to cough up the difference — which, it’s worth pointing out, is nearly the same price as the base Kindle model.

It’s really bright

Kobo experiments aside, the industry has settled pretty comfortably into the six-inch display. And it’s hard to argue that it’s not the ideal size for most readers. Five inches just doesn’t afford enough real estate and seven starts getting unwieldy.

But while the size has remained largely the same, the screens have continued to get better with nearly every generation. At 300ppi (pixels per inch), the Voyage feels like it’s skipped a generation. That’s light years beyond the base Kindle’s 167 and the latest Paperwhite’s 212. It’s even well above the Kobo Aura HD’s 265, which played a major role securing that device’s position as the Cadillac of ebook readers when it was released nine months ago.

What that means for most users is incredibly sharp text. If you’re prone to reading newspapers or magazines on the device, you’ll be getting higher-res grayscale images, but for the rest of us, it means the text really pops. At this point, what you’re looking at is pretty comparable to the printed page. Keep in mind, the screen on last year’s Paperwhite is perfectly fine, but placed next to the Voyage, the text looks downright soft.

The contrast is even more pronounced when the front lighting is turned on. Once again, you accomplish that in the touchscreen settings. Amazon never did go in for the devoted light button, which has always come down to a matter of personal preference. The point is made even more moot with the introduction of the adaptive light.

If you hold the reader at the right angle, you’ll see a small circle next to the top-right corner of the display which looks a bit like an opaque front-facing camera. That’s actually a light sensor. Tick the box next to the light meter in settings and the screen will automatically adjust based on the light level of the room you’re in — a great addition to save both your battery and eyes.

The waterproof Kindle can’t be that far off, right?

The Voyage gets bright: really, really bright. Helped along, perhaps, by the lack of display gap, the new Kindle may, in fact, hurt your eyes at full brightness in a dark room. The flush screen has also helped to alleviate light bleed from the sides, since there isn’t as much direct front lighting exposed off the screen. And while the display still isn’t a perfectly white color, the added brightness has taken the reader yet another step in that direction. The first-generation front-light readers look downright murky by comparison.

E Ink continues to be the best option for devoted electronic reading. It’s easier on the eyes, readable in direct sunlight, and can milk a heck of a lot of time out of a battery. It also keeps getting better year after year.

Reading experience

Not much has changed on the reading front, and that’s not a bad thing. Amazon’s had several years to get this right and has happily recognized that, on a whole, simpler is better. If you wanted distraction, you’d buy a Kindle Fire or any of the other innumerable tablets out there. As such, the layout is nearly identical to older Kindles. You still get the same eight text sizes and six font styles, with all the same margin and spacing options.

The touchscreen is extremely responsive and pages turn quickly. Amazon has never eliminated those full-screen refreshes, but it has greatly reduced them over past years. The frequency of flickers you get while turning the pages differs based on the number of non-textual elements in a book. I noticed a full-page refresh once every 14 pages, or some on purely text title — that’s down from every six a couple of generations ago. The display recognizes some dual-touch gestures, as well, so you can, say, pinch to adjust the font sizes.

Now on its seventh generation, Amazon has built up an extremely robust ecosystem of extras, piece by piece. X-Ray brings plenty of contextual and supplemental information to the reading experience via Wikipedia, The Oxford English and publisher-provided information, while Goodreads brings a social element to the reading experience. The company still has a ways to go to fully integrate the social network’s recommendations into device, but it’s a tricky thing to do so without making it overly distracting.

There aren’t a whole lot of brand-new features on the software side, this time out. As with the first-generation Paperwhite, a few features are still listed as “coming soon,” destined to roll out with a future software update. Among them is Word Wise, which brings automatic definitions to denser titles with more difficult words.

There’s also an improved search that combines results from the library, store, and friends on Goodreads. Coming Soon is also neat. It offers up contextual information about a book as you start to read. Again, it’s not a lot of new stuff, but seven generations is a lot of time to get the relatively simple reading experience just right, and no one does it better than Amazon.

In spite of Barnes & Noble’s absence and Sony’s relative silence, the devoted ebook reader arms race hasn’t ended. Kobo is pushing the space’s limitations and Amazon is following suit, incorporating new technologies into its mainstream products. The Aura HD showed us there is room for a high-end reader and the Voyage does a great job turning those features into a flagship reader.

At $200 and up, this is a pricey book reader for Amazon. Most of you will be plenty content buying a cheaper Kindle. The Paperwhite, for example, is still a fine reader made even better with that quiet storage doubling, all with a $120 starting price. The new Kobo Aura H20, meanwhile, will set you back $180, with the added bonus of being able to read the thing in the tub.

If you’re an everyday reader and can’t really remember the last time you left the house without a book — electronic or otherwise — in tow, the overall improved reading experience may be well worth the price of admission. This is, without question, the best Kindle ebook reader yet. Heck, between the improved specs and Amazon’s industry-best reading ecosystem, it’s the best devoted e-reader you can buy.

Casual readers, on the other hand, are better off waiting for the inevitable price drops, first when sales slow a bit and then when the company gets ready for a follow up. The waterproof Kindle can’t be that far off, right?

Available at Amazon

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Just over a week ago, Amazon added four new members to its Fire family of budget tablets. And today, during its Devices and Services event, Amazon announced it is bringing some of the tablet fun to its Kindle e-reader portfolio. And by tablet fun, we mean the ability to draw gibberish on the screen with a stylus.

If you've ever looked longingly at the reMArkable 2 paper tablet and wished that the stylus input somehow made it to a Kindle, your prayers have been answered. Say hello to the Kindle Scribe, Amazon's next-gen e-book reader that will let you scribble with a stylus.

Books are wonderful things, and if you have a mini library at home, we're willing to bet you wouldn't trade all of them for an e-book reader loaded down with your favorites. But while they may lack the tactile nature of a book, an e-book reader is still something every keen reader should consider. Many of the models available come with backlights so you can read in lower light, can make the font bigger to suit your needs, and are small enough to slip into a pocket — and e-book readers are always going to beat physical books when it comes to going on holiday, especially if you're a fast reader.

But which e-book reader should you buy? There's no shortage of great readers out there, and while Amazon's Kindle Oasis may be the biggest name that nearly everyone knows, there are other options available if you're looking to get an e-reader that's not tied to the world's largest shopping site. Here are the best e-book readers for 2022.

Amazon's Kindle is getting even better this week with a new model that introduces a new display, a more compact design, and support for USB-C. It's nothing that'll replace your Kindle Oasis, but if you want a Kindle while spending as little as possible, there's a lot to like with the new baseline option.

This 2022 Kindle release will see the baseline Kindle pick up a high-resolution display that's capable of dark mode, support for USB-C, 16GB of storage, and extended battery life with up to six weeks on a single charge. The Kids edition of the tablet will, like other Kids edition tablets, comes with a kid-friendly cover and a free subscription to Amazon's Kids+ service.

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End of the Voyage: Amazon Kills Pricey E-Reader

Amazon's removed the Kindle Voyage from its e-reader lineup, after it placed the tablet's best feature in a cheaper device.

Amazon has simplified its Kindle e-reader line, by setting the Kindle Voyage off on a one-way trip into the ocean. According to new reports, the $200 device was removed from Amazon.com last month, with no fanfare or announcement.

An August 1 post on the e-reader blog GoodEReader noted that the Voyage "is no longer available to be purchased on the main Amazon website in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States." The Voyage also never received the Dec. 12 software update that added Audible audiobook-listening capabilities that Amazon pushed to its other e-readers.

The Kindle Voyage , originally released in 2014, looked to provide voracious readers with a premium experience. The Voyage's best perk, its sharp, 300 ppi (pixels per inch) display, was soon found in the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite , the company's $119 e-reader.

MORE: Best Kindle - A Comparison to Help Decide Which You Should Buy

Amazon later brought the Voyage's other high-end feature, its automatically-adjusting light-sensitive display, to the $250 Kindle Oasis . That higher-end tablet, which is still for sale, comes with two other perks: a luxe-feeling graphite-aluminum shell and IPX8-rated water-resistance, which enables it to survive underwater.

The Kindle line's last remaining family member is its cheapest, the $79 Amazon Kindle , which features a lower-resolution 168 ppi screen and lacks backlighting.

A Tom's Guide report published earlier this year noted that the e-readers industry "took a huge dive" starting in 2012 that only got worse over time, with Amazon shipping 7.1 million Kindles in 2016, as opposed to the 23.2 million units moved in 2011. Meanwhile, the Barnes & Noble Nook line has suffered, as our review of its recent Glowlight 3 found it to offer a "laggy, convoluted interface" and "broken features."

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Henry is a managing editor at Tom’s Guide covering streaming media, laptops and all things Apple, reviewing devices and services for the past seven years. Prior to joining Tom's Guide, he reviewed software and hardware for TechRadar Pro, and interviewed artists for Patek Philippe International Magazine. He's also covered the wild world of professional wrestling for Cageside Seats, interviewing athletes and other industry veterans.

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Katie Collins

Amazon Kindle Voyage review

High-resolution screen; automatically adjusts brightness levels according to ambient light; squeeze pads for turning pages

Much more expensive than other Kindle models; no dedicated high-end software features

Perhaps it will come as no surprise to hear that the newest and most expensive Kindle from Amazon is its best ever. But it really is. The price tag could be sticking point, however. At £170, the top-of-the range Kindle Voyage is the most expensive ebook reader Amazon has developed yet, but with similarly remarkable electronic ink tech available at a remarkably affordable price in the form of the £60 Kindle, has Amazon undercut itself?

The screen on the Kindle Voyage was made for those mammoth reading sessions in which night or day, no matter how fatigued, you just can't put a book down. Its 300 pixels per inch display is very high resolution for a device of this type and therefore very kind on your eyes.

To stop you from squinting in the darkness, the Kindle will automatically adjust to new lighting situations so, as time goes by, will get lighter or darker as your eyes start to adjust to the changed visibility conditions. This is almost imperceptible, in the way of discreet five-star hotel service -- you feel comfortable and taken care of, and yet there have been no interruptions to your private time.

As well as the actual device being the thinnest and lightest Kindle ever, the Voyage has some other tricks up its sleeves that we haven't seen on previous models. Running down each vertical bezel is a line and a dot. Squeeze the line and the page will flick forwards and squeeze the dot and the page flicks back one.

This obviously makes it ideal for lefties and means that most of the time you don't even need to lift a finger to turn the page (just shift your thumb a bit instead). The Voyage provides noiseless haptic feedback that you can only feel in your thumb.

Over time it becomes more sensitive -- Voyage newbies tend to squeeze harder out of excitement, which was definitely true of WIRED.co.uk's reviewer.

It's a boon and a novelty and perfect for those lazy days on a sun lounger when you're lying on one side holding the Kindle up to help shield your eyes from the sun as you read (just don't try and balance it on your face if you decide to have a nap). But it is also to an extent a luxury. Touching the screen to turn the page is not all that more difficult than squeezing the bezel -- not £110 more difficult at any rate.

It should be mentioned that there are some great features on-board the Kindle, including expanded X-Ray -- which lets you look at the "bare bones" of the book -- and a smart lookup tool that integrates X-Ray, dictionary and Wikipedia information about the book in one place. On their way are other features -- enhanced search, family libraries and Word Wise to help you understand more complex books. All great, but these features are also all available on the £60 Kindle.

Matt Jancer

David Nield

The Voyage's main competition aside from Amazon's other products is the Nook Glow -- a lovely, light ebook reader with similar light-emitting technology to the Paperwhite and a 6-inch screen that costs only £90. Of course this locks you out of Amazon's ebook ecosystem, but if you've yet to invest in a device, that is not necessarily a problem.

Amazon revolutionised the hardware people used for reading for the mass market in a way the human race hadn't seen for centuries, but innovating such a low-tech activity comes at a price. As it always has done, the luxury of reading lies in the content itself rather than the more disposable vehicle that delivers it.

The Kindle Voyage is a fabulous device that we wouldn't hesitate to endorse, but ultimately we couldn't recommend to someone that they should pay to upgrade from a recent older model. Similarly, if you're debating between the cheaper and more expensive Kindles, you are probably better off going for the £60 device and spending the change on stocking up your ebook library. The exceptions to this are if you have no choice but to read in the dark, or if your name is Moneybags -- in which case, go wild and enjoy.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

Amanda Hoover

Lydia Morrish

Kathy Gilsinan

Lauren Goode

Will Knight

Paresh Dave

Makena Kelly

Matt Burgess

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2021)

Amazon Kindle Voyage

79 facts in comparison

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2021) vs Amazon Kindle Voyage

Why is amazon kindle paperwhite (2021) better than amazon kindle voyage.

• Supports text-to-speech ?
• 13.33% bigger screen size ? 6.8" vs 6"
• 4GB more internal storage ? 8GB vs 4GB
• Is dustproof and water-resistant ?
• 2.62x higher resolution ? 1236 x 1648 px vs 758 x 1024 px
• 28.79% more battery power ? 1700 mAh vs 1320 mAh
• Is weather-sealed (splashproof) ?
• 1.5 hours shorter charge time ? 2.5 hours vs 4 hours

Why is Amazon Kindle Voyage better than Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2021)?

• 25 g lighter ? 180 g vs 205 g
• 9.6 mm narrower ? 115 mm vs 124.6 mm
• 0.5 mm thinner ? 7.6 mm vs 8.1 mm
• 12.2 mm shorter ? 162 mm vs 174.2 mm

Which are the most popular comparisons?

Kobo Clara 2E

Kobo Libra 2

Amazon Kindle Oasis (2019)

Amazon Kindle Oasis WiFi + 3G

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition (2021)

Amazon Kindle (2022)

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite

Onyx Boox Leaf

PocketBook Touch

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Kids (2021)

Amazon Kindle Oasis WiFi

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2013)

PocketBook InkPad 4

Tolino Vision 2

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2018)

Amazon Kindle Scribe

Cheap alternatives

Onyx Boox KON-TIKI 3

User reviews

No reviews yet

Be the first. Use your experience to help others in the community make a decision.

Unknown. Help us by suggesting a value. (Amazon Kindle Voyage)

Unknown. Help us by suggesting a value. (Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2021))

1236 x 1648 px

758 x 1024 px

Performance

Connectivity.

Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n)

Miscellaneous

Which are the best e-readers.

Huawei MatePad Paper

Onyx Boox Tab Mini C

Onyx Boox Galileo

Onyx Boox Note 4

Onyx Boox Nova Air 2

TCL Nxtpaper

Onyx Boox Tab Ultra C

Onyx Boox Palma

Onyx Boox Tab Ultra

Onyx Boox Page