To me it looks like an adult mini etch-a-sketch without the dials. But a couple of days in with the Kindle 2022 base model and I’m now realising why people are starting to rave about these things..
(The Amazon links included in this post are affiliate links which means if you click them and buy anything from Amazon, I may get a payment from Amazon as a thank you. Any money made will go to my car fund which at the moment is hilariously underwhelming.)
This wasn’t the original plan
No when I sat down at the start of 2023 to work out my plan of attack, at no stage did I spend any thought on making my world just that little more technical. But then came Jurgen the smart watch which has come in so handy when hunting down socks in the dark and now Kenny the Kindle (aka my Kindle 2022) has come along with the promise of holding onto thousands of books.
The thing is, I don’t have thousands of books. A few moves ago I did have quite a lot of tomes of lore gathering dust on the shelves (subsequent house shifts have culled that collection dramatically), but they certainly didn’t add up to the thousands (well unless you factor in comics…I might come close then once upon a time.) And then there’s the love of holding a real book, the smell of the pages (when I could smell, hopefully that’s back soon), the tactile feel of the paper, putting the book down…and forgetting when you left it when you come back.
I knew these sensations would be difficult to beat but still, I was willing to try – friends have been raving about their e-readers recently so why not give it a whirl?
So with some cash as a gift from my recent birthday, I picked one up from JB. And this is the 11th generation Kindle 2022 (not to be confused with the 11th generation Kindle 2021 which is 0.8 inches larger). Available in blue or black, this is the Toyota Corolla or Honda Accord of Kindle’s current e-reader collection: It’ll do the job just fine but if you want something smoother, you’re going to be paying for it.
And so my $179 at the time of writing netted me 6 inches of solid book reading machine with USB-C charging (which is handy because so is my phone), a cord and three months complimentary Kindle Unlimited membership to fill up the 16gb memory. Setup was stupidly easy (I used the Kindle app already on my phone), it synced up to my Amazon details in no time and then came to ultimate mission – what could I read with it?
Kindle 2022 – am I restricted to only Amazon?
The good news is, no, no you are not. Which I was very thankful to hear because I have a small collection of eBooks that I’ve downloaded over the years (usually through various charity bundles) and I was wondering if they’d work on Kenny, even if they weren’t available on Amazon.
It turns out all I had to do was email these .epub files directly to Kenny, sync him up again and bam, there they were! No seriously, Kenny has his own email address. Put your previously downloaded books, jpegs, word documents, mobi files and more in an email, shoot it to your device and refresh. Suddenly my mini library was starting to take shape!
CHECK OUT KINDLE 2022 ON AMAZON US OR AMAZON AUS
Kindle 2022 – but how does it read?
Really really well – I have mine set to black background with white writing and have found myself carrying it all over the house since I brought it home to read on a whim. The anti-glare screen is a matt level of finish (unlike your phone) and so far while I still have to use my glasses to read, I haven’t noticed any strain using this device for a few hours at a time.
I’ve read through a couple of books I’ve had on file now (why I downloaded and kept 101 donuts recipes for this long I’ll never know, the lure of free stuff hey?) and my pile is growing. Taking advantage of the Kindle Unlimited 3 month offer…well that list of things to read is only going to grow exponentially.
Two tips though: 1. Don’t get your kids onto it otherwise they’ll start using it for all kinds of kids books (my daughter Sophie is mad about the Wings of Fire series currently.) 2. Don’t eat lunch with your fingers and try to turn pages at the same time, that’s not going to make that crisp screen look as sharp as it can..
What I like about the Kindle 2022
-Put 1 or 10,000 books and things to read on it and it’s not going to change the weight at all.
-Bored of the book you’re reading? Just flip back and pick something else from the menu or dial a new book in! Seriously, the Kindle 2022 has ‘Don’t move out of the comfy couch’ written all over it, even though if you have a Samsung smart watch like I have, it’ll still suggest you get up and stretch on occasion..
-The email option. Emailing books to a device to load them in is actually genius and quite impressive when you tell people about it.
-The anti glare screen doesn’t look real and I mean that in a positive way. It almost looks like I’ve bought a plastic demonstration model from JB Hi-Fi, stuck on one section of the book. Well that is until you turn the page onto the next page, that also looks like it’s a display model. Covers look like highly detailed sketches.
-Charge lasts a while if you’re only reading.
-It’s for reading and not pissing time up the wall on Facebook. Or Insta. Or Tik Tok, YouTube and every other distraction available online nude or not. This is a good thing, especially if you planned on reading more books this year.
-I can see how my covers from my own books look like as screen savers!
What I don’t like about the Kindle 2022
-Page turning is fast, using it to search for books through the Kindle store or anything else is not. Still, you can easily pick up where you left off from where you were reading.
-Don’t bother with the inbuilt browser on this thing if it points anywhere other than Amazon. That’s not what it was built for.
-With the Kindle 2022 there’s no obvious way to look under the hood here if something goes wrong and I’m guessing the battery only has a limited shelf life. By the time that dies though, we’ll probably be quite a few generations in the future and you probably wouldn’t want to resurrect it anyway.
-Without a cover, I feel like I’m going to damage this thing easily. Therefore I will be buying an inexpensive cover…when I finally find a design I like.
Overall..
The screen weirds me out in a good way and it’s going to take some time grasping the concept of a library in my palm but I’m loving the Kindle 2022 so far because it does what it’s supposed to, distraction free reading whenever you’re ready.
It’s an Ipad for books and if you love your reading, what’s not to enjoy here?
WHERE TO GET ONE
The Kindle 2022 base model is available pretty much everywhere although always at the same price (currently $179 everywhere you look). If you’re in Australia you should find plenty on hand at JB, Officework and the like. If you’re nowhere near either of those retailers (or overseas), then why not go to the source direct? That would be Amazon and here’s a couple of affiliate links to get you started.
Kindle 2022 – US (Affiliate link)
Kindle 2022 – Aus (Affiliate link)
Edit – a quick word on Kindle 2022 cases
I was originally going to buy a cover for my Kindle 2022 through JB Hi-Fi but at $49 I thought it’d be best searched for elsewhere. Luckily there’s far cheaper options through Amazon (US affiliate link/AUS affiliate link) although if you’re prepared to wait a couple of weeks, AliExpress is definitely an option too. This one arrived today and it’s far better quality than I expected.
It’s solid, Kindle is embossed on both the outside and inside and it automatically wakes your unit up to continue on where you left off when you open it.
At just $10.43 AUD to my door, it was well worth the wait (which was only 15 days all up) so the AE option is definitely worth considering. Happy reading!
One month on – My kindle has decided it just does not like the USB-C cord I’ve been using to charge with. All the phones in the house charge on this just fine, the Kindle however doesn’t want a bar of it. Thankfully that seems to be the only USB-C cord is has issues with, it charges just fine on everything else.