Visually, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft differs from its predecessor at first glance. The 11-inch diagonal screen is a little larger than its predecessor’s 10-inch screen and now sits symmetrically in the housing. Thanks to the even, narrow frame, the Scribe Colorsoft looks more stylish than its predecessor with the wide edge on one side. From an ergonomic point of view, however, it is a deterioration, as the wide edge was practical for holding the device while reading. Since the tablet weighs less than 400 grams, it doesn’t weigh on your arm even when reading for long periods of time.
The case consists of a unibody back made of aluminum and a screen cover made of matt plastic, only interrupted by a USB-C socket on the bottom and the power switch on the right. The device makes an extremely high-quality impression, but the design comes at the expense of repairability. In order to get to the inside of the tablet, the screen that is glued to the housing has to be removed – laypeople should stay away from it. Amazon does not provide replacement parts or repair instructions.
Amazon has upgraded the hardware compared to the first release. Inside, an unspecified quad-core processor does its job; it replaces the dual-core processor of its predecessor. The processor reaches a maximum clock speed of 2 GHz. With E-Ink tablets, the slow refresh rate of the screen is usually the limiting factor rather than the processor. But since the Kindle with a color display is likely to handle larger files such as comics and PDFs more often than its monochrome colleague, the increase seems advisable. Amazon sells the Kindle in two versions with 32 or 64 GB of storage.
That was the reading sample of our heise Plus article “Kindle Scribe Colorsoft in the test: Amazon’s first e-ink tablet with a color display”. With a heise Plus subscription you can read the entire article.
