Amazon Kindle Voyage review: expensive but top quality e-reader

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Amazon’s latest e-reader is a top-of-the-range Kindle Voyage with high-resolution screen, new haptic page turns and slim, angular design

The Kindle Voyage is Amazon’s latest e-reader, but instead of being value-focused, the Voyage is a high-quality device with a crisper screen and fancy, squeezable touch buttons.

Amazon’s Kindle started out in 2007 as an expensive and rather rough device that garnered little in the way of praise. Seven years later, the cheapest Kindle costs £59 and the more expensive Kindle Paperwhite costs £99, but the new Kindle Voyage starts at £169 and is designed to be a luxury book reader. It is really worth the extra £70?

Crisp and bright

The Voyage looks like almost the same as any other Kindle but for the screen, which is now flush with the e-reader’s body, which makes it look more like a tablet and stops dirt and dust from getting caught in the edges.

The build-quality of the Voyage is also very good, with little in the way of flex or bend, despite being the lightest Kindle made to date. Weighing 180g, it’s 26g lighter than the Paperwhite and 11g lighter than the basic Kindle.

The back has a soft-touch plastic finish, which allows for a reassuring grip, while the thin edges and angular design on the back make holding the Voyage with one hand easy.

The 6in screen is crisper too, with a higher pixel density of 300 pixels per inch (ppi), up from the 212ppi of the Paperwhite’s screen. The text is noticeably clearer, while the ambient light sensor adjusts the backlight automatically. The screen and even backlight combination makes the Voyage’s display arguably the best ever fitted to an e-reader.

Specifications

Screen: 6in e-paper (300ppi)
Dimensions: 162 x 115 x 7.6 mm
Weight: 180g (3G version 188g)
Connectivity: Wi-Fi (3G optional)
Storage: 4GB
Battery life: rated for approximately 21 hours of reading

Battery life

Amazon rates the Kindle Voyage with a battery life of six weeks of 30 minutes’ reading a day with a medium backlight, which works out at about 21 hours. In my testing it lasted approximately 19 hours with 3G on and the backlight varying with ambient light.

With the backlight turned right down and connectivity turned off it will last significantly longer. Charging took approximately three hours via USB.

Reading experience

Amazon’s Kindle reading experience is one of the best available, with useful features such as X-Ray, which allows readers to track character appearances through a novel with explanations of who they are pulled in from Shelfari (a community-powered books encyclopedia) and Wikipedia.

The Voyage is the fastest Kindle I have used to date, with page turns happening instantly, the buttons and keyboard reacting more like a touchscreen tablet, and scrolling between books only exhibiting small amounts of lag. It makes the experience of using an e-book reader much more like the snappy smartphones and tablets that people are used to.

The sides of the Voyage have four new buttons, which are hidden in the frame – two each side of the screen for left or right-handed use. These page turn buttons are squeezable, requiring a user-adjustable amount of pressure to turn the page.

The squeeze buttons are satisfying to use, gently vibrating when pushed, make flipping backwards and forwards between pages easy, and are much harder to activate accidentally than physical buttons. Pages can still be turned by swipes or touches on the screen, but the buttons can be activated when wearing gloves.

Pricy

The Kindle Voyage costs £169 for the Wi-Fi-only version and £229 for the version with 3G. That’s £60 more than the £109 Kindle Paperwhite, £110 more than the £59 basic Kindle and £39 more than Kobo’s £130 Aura HD.

It’s also £40 more expensive than a very good low-cost full Android tablet such as the £129 Tesco Hudl 2 or £60 more than the £99 Kindle Fire HDX.

Verdict

The Kindle Voyage is the best e-reader available. The screen is the sharpest, most evenly lit and easy to read. It is light and easy to hold with one hand and the squeezable buttons are excellent.

The problem is that the Voyage costs more than a decent Android tablet with much more functionality. It is a single-use device and while the Voyage the Rolls Royce of e-readers, its cheaper competitors including the Kindle Paperwhite offer almost as good an experience for considerably less.

Pros: great screen, automatic backlight, light, solid, squeezable page-turn buttons

Cons: 19-hour battery life needs a charger on holiday, expensive, single-use device, some may not like being tied to Amazon