Gadgetory

hi I'm David Carr Noah here with the second generation Kindle paperwhite I don't know if the analogy is completely appropriate but I look at this as kind of the iPhone 5s of readers it looks nearly identical to the original paperwhite but it's better and zippier for starters this is the first shipping product to feature a inks pearl to display which offers slightly better contrast instead of the 800 megahertz processors that are found in the original paperwhite you get a one gigahertz processor and there's a next generation built-in light and a more responsive touchscreen display that is a 19% tighter touch grid it's also a hair lighter weighing in at seven point three ounces instead of seven point five ounces the most immediate difference you notice between the new paperwhite and the original is that the display looks whiter as opposed to having a little bit of a blue twinge and the lighting is more uniform also the light is brighter at its highest setting on the original paperwhite there was a bit of murkiness a sort of clouding effect at the bottom of the display when using the light particularly at night the light now displays much more evenly across the screen it's a definite improvement amazon says the contrast has been increased but it's hard to tell that the blacks are that much blacker even if they are still the screen is more pleasant to look at particularly when the light is on and looks more like a page from printed book it's also worth mentioning that the new display requires less refreshing to eliminate the artifacts or ghosting that's inherent to eing screens the previous bottle refreshed about every six page terms and my test the smile seems to refresh about every 13 to 14 page turns as for battery life it remains the same it up to two months with Wi-Fi off despite the bump in processor speed it comes with the same two gigabytes of integrated storage 1.25 gigabytes of which is available for the user the rest of the changes involved feature upgrades that Amazon has or will add through software updates these include a smart lookup feature that streamlines the dictionary x-ray and Wikipedia lookup interface with a single easy to access set of tabs and vocabulary builder which keeps track of all the words you look up in the dictionary and allows you to create flashcards to help you learn those words Goodreads integration and Kindle page flip a sort of picture and picture page scanning feature are coming soon as is Amazon's kid centric kindle freetime feature which adds parental controls I also compare this model to Cobos aura which is a nicely designed ereader but the screen and lighting are better on the Kindle it's not a huge difference but it's definitely noticeable and the paperwhite cost less starting at 119 for the Wi-Fi only model that serves up ads Amazon calls some special offers on your home screen this may seem like an unspectacular upgrade on the surface but it clearly improves on the previous Kindle paperwhite basically Amazon has taken a very good product and made it about 20 to 25 percent better and while it would have liked to have seen Amazon's engineers cut the size and weight down by about 25 percent kind of like the Kobo aura it's still the best eReader currently available I'm David Carnot thanks for watching