Last year, Amazon finally put a color display on one of their Kindle e-readers. This year, they’re doing the same for their note-taking tablets and it comes in the form of the Amazon Kindle Scribe Colorsoft.
Amazon’s note-taking tablet isn’t just equipped with a new color display, it’s also got a bigger screen size than the last generation, all while being surprisingly lighter, which, we guess, is a result of losing the large bezel on one side. That means a lot more screen real estate for your notes and sketches, while being even easier to hold in hand during use. Of course, this is still much larger than your typical e-reader, so it’s not quite the easiest thing to carry around.
The Amazon Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is equipped with an 11-inch display, which is a bump up in size from the 10.2-inch screen from the previous generation. It has 300 ppi pixel density when displaying in grayscale, although that goes down to 150 ppi in color mode, so you do lose considerable sharpness if you want to use it in full color. No word on what kind of E-Ink panel was used for this, but Amazon says it’s a custom oxide-based display with a paper-like color that’s easy on the eyes. The display has a textured surface, too, so it should feel a lot better to write on compared to your standard iPads and Android tablets, all while being ultra-responsive, so you can see every stroke you write immediately on screen. There’s also an auto-adjusting front light so the screen should be perfectly legible, regardless of whatever ambient light is present in the vicinity.
The included stylus snaps to the side of the tablet magnetically, allowing you to keep it nearby at all times. It’s battery-free, so there’s no need to worry about charging another device, with replaceable tips, so you can adjust the writing and drawing feel on the fly. According to the outfit, you can write using 10 different pen colors, five highlighters, and even a shader tool to give your sketches some much-needed depth.
The Amazon Kindle Scribe Colorsoft comes with a built-in notebook function, so you can create as many notebooks as you need for all your writing and sketches. All the notebooks are searchable via an AI-powered search tool, too, so you can easily find old notes without having to memorize where every item is located. The AI can also generate summaries of your notes and even chat about various items in your notes to uncover insights, which is probably similar to what you can do with Google’s NotebookLM. Like other note-taking tablets, it can refine your handwriting or convert it into digital text for easier indexing.
Like other E-Ink devices, it has long battery life, with the outfit claiming up to eight weeks for reading and up to two weeks for writing between charges. Other features include two options in storage (32GB and 64GB), IPX8 water resistance rating, a new quad-core processor for lag-free use, built-in data encrypotion, compatibility with Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, support for PDF and Word formats, and the ability to export notebooks to Microsoft’s OneNote. Aside from the new color Scribe, they’re also releasing two grayscale variants: one with a front light and one without.
The Amazon Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is available now.
