So I've been wondering about ereaders like the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. They're pretty inexpensive, and have pretty good reviews, but the bad reviews are consistent (for the latest model). Screen glare, abhorrent battery life, dead pixel, buggy navigation. Many of the negative reviews also note that the "improvements" such as being waterproof or having more storage are inconsequential.
Does anyone routinely use these? Would you recommend getting one?
Anyway, I would say if you can get your books or documents on epub or mobi or amazon's format, then e-readers are a great option. I personally use the Oasis and the battery life and screen performance are awesome. I think the screen size is also a bit bigger than the previous versions.
Most of the new 300 ppi devices use the same screens, or small variations on it, so the differences are not huge in terms of screen quality.
I recently moved from a Kindle paperwhite (6") to a pocketbook inkpad 3 (8" screen) and the extra space is really a great for reading but I am not sure it's big enough for PDFs. Battery life is great, but the software seems to be more mature on Kindles, but still it's totally usable.
I could recommend to go bigger, but that comes on the expense of mobility and the price jumps sharply as you go bigger.
I have a Kindle Paperwhite from (I think) 2014 and it still holds up quite well. I recently read the Kleppmann book (Designing Data-Intensive Applications) on it and it was fine, but I would have liked the ability to scribble notes and put in physical bookmarks. From a technical perspective, everything worked quite well but I'm not sure I would want to read the UEFI spec on it.
I actually wrote a post about this here:
The good
- It's 13", so I can read/annotate full-size documents.
- Very little eye strain.
- Battery lasts almost a full week*
- There's a little bit of that "magic" when using it.
Neutral
- Syncing with computer and app is OK, nothing special.
The Bad
- It's fragile. Chipped plastic, and dead lines of pixels a year in.
- * Writing drains the battery faster than zooming/flipping pages. At a conference I barely lasted lasted a few hours of heavy writing.
The latest generations are indeed not much of an upgrade from previous ones. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t better for reading than a tablet. As long as you get something high-dpi and front-lit there’s not much better you can do.