This Kindle Paperwhite deal is as good as it gets before Christmas

The new Kindle Paperwhite is, as I said in my review, a fantastic device that somehow manages to improve on the already pretty well-refined Kindle formula. It does this by borrowing a couple of the luxury features from the vastly more expensive Kindle Oasis and dropping them into a device that’s close to half the price: waterproofing and Audible syncing.

Amazon has dropped the price of the device to £99.99 ahead of Christmas, and it should make a fine gift if you’re still shopping around. Yes, it was £89.99 for Black Friday, but unless you also happen to have got a time machine as part of your Christmas shopping, then this is likely to be as good as it gets in 2018. And if you *have* got a time machine, then it’s probably best to get something from the future rather than an e-book reader. Just a suggestion.

Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, the Kindle Paperwhite.

It’s not the cheapest Kindle, but it improves on the basic £60 model in pretty much every way. It has a sharper display, a backlight with brightness controls for reading in the dark, a screen that is flush with the bezels rather than set back, and it comes with twice the storage. Not that storage space is ever really a problem with Kindles, but the new Paperwhite will let you store around 6,000 books on its 8GB of internal storage – though fewer if you fancy getting into audiobooks too.

That’s right, the new Kindle will let you pair Bluetooth headphones and play your Audible books natively on the device. In a brilliant touch, if you own both the Kindle and Audible version of a book, the two will sync progress between them, meaning you can listen to your book on a walk to the station, and then continue reading once you board the train. It’s a little thing, but a very nice one.

And that’s really what the new version of the Kindle is all about: lots of little niceties that add up to a really compelling product. Not enough to upgrade on their own, perhaps, but if you want a new Kindle at £99.99, this is the right product at the right price.

Written by

Alan Martin

Alan Martin is a freelance writer with more than a decade’s worth of experience, mainly in the technology space, with bylines at The Evening Standard, Tom's Guide, The i and many others. His main focus at Expert Reviews is ensuring that your next pick of phone or wearable is the right choice for you and represents the best possible value for money. In the past he’s covered a broad range of games, dental apparel and pet accessories and, on one memorable occasion, had to strip off to retrieve a rogue drone from a lake – such is his dedication to reviews.

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