- Amazon's first Kindle launched in November, 2007.
Since then, every Kindle has been an e-reader, until now.
- 15 years later, the Kindle Scribe
is the first Kindle that's an e-writer too, pen included.
Is this Amazon's iPad killer?
- Let's find out.
But first, let's o-pen the box.
- That's terrible.
- The Kindle Scribe comes with 16, 32,
or 64 gigabytes of storage space, a stylist pen,
which you can upgrade to the premium pen,
for an additional $30, a USB-C charging cable,
five replacement pen tips,
and a tip replacement tool.
- Out in the box, it was a bit heavier than I expected.
I guess I just went in with the expectation
that it would be closer to a book than a tablet,
in terms of weight.
- Yeah
I think I had textbooks that were heavier than this though.
- Maybe just a little bit, yeah.
- imagine if your backpack could have just this in it.
- I'd be buying it.
I'm not a huge book reader, but I am a huge note taker.
I really like the feel of writing on real paper.
And if this Kindle can replace my notebooks,
it's gonna be a winner for me.
The other thing I'd love for this Kindle to be able to do,
is let me write in the margins of books.
When I read, I like to write on the books themselves,
'cause I like to make it a conversation with the text.
And also if I'm highlighting, and scribbling in margins,
then I tend to remember what I'm reading more.
Couple questions I have:
how hard is it to transfer documents
to and from the Kindle Scribe?
And, how does the notebook part of the Kindle Scribe,
which is new, compare to the Notes app on an iPad?
- I'm also interested in seeing how the notes are organized,
because it's great that you can take notes,
but if you can't go back, and find those notes,
then it's pretty useless.
- The setup process was a little harder
than I thought it would be,
especially since Amazon included
this really easy to follow guide.
But it was weird.
There was a bug with the app,
where we had to connect to wifi,
but every single wifi network, except for my wifi network
was showing up.
So then I just set it up on the Kindle itself,
and everything worked.
It's a bug with the app.
- You can connect to any network except for your own.
- Except your own.
- That's the difference.
It's already deterring you from connecting to wifi,
and getting distracted by other websites.
- Indeed, and that is one of the major selling points.
This is distraction-free.
- It's sort of true, this is distraction-free,
but these days it's so easy to be distracted.
You know, you're reading your book at home,
or you're on your commute, your phone is with you.
That's going off.
And by the way, not all distractions are bad.
What if you got an important text or email,
you need to respond to right away?
You're not gonna get it on your Kindle.
You would on your iPad for example.
I think the distraction-free selling point
would be great for a classrooms,
for example.
You got young kids,
instead of giving them an iPad,
with a million different things you can do on it,
give 'em one of these.
They can read a book and that's it.
- As long as there aren't any color pictures in that book,
because this has 16 levels of gray scale,
which is great, but no colors
- Lack of color in the display could be an issue,
especially if you're reading like a bomb diffusing guide,
and it says cut the blue wire, and they're all gray,
you can't tell which one's the blue wire.
- In a lot of ways the Kindle Scribe
is similar to the ninth generation iPad.
We have a fourth generation iPad Air here.
We didn't have a ninth generation iPad lying around,
but the specs are really similar.
Both of these devices have a 500 nit display.
This has a 10.2 inch display,
so does the ninth generation iPad.
- Kindle Scribe
300 pixels per inch, iPad, ninth gen, 264 pixels per inch.
- Pretty close.
iPad ninth gen, colors.
- Colors.
- More colors.
Are the multitude of ways
the iPad kicks the Kindle Scribe's butt,
outweighed by the things the Kindle Scribe does really well,
and better than the iPad?
- One of the biggest differences we noticed,
between the Kindle Scribe,
and the iPad is that we took them both outside,
the Kindle Scribe, in direct sunlight,
did so much better than the iPad.
It was unbelievable.
- Even with no backlight,
the Kindle Scribe still looked amazing,
and that's because of the E Ink display.
You don't need a backlight in direct sunlight.
The viewing angle on the Kindle
is also much better than the iPad,
but not many people are reading like this.
So you know, typically you pick an angle and read,
not as big of a deal.
And that's just one of the ways that's better than an iPad.
But is it one of the only ways?
- Pinch-to-zoom on the Kindle Scribe, absolute disaster.
It's slow.
It's almost impossible
to get the zoom right where you want it.
iPad super easy.
- The iPad's display, obviously,
has a much higher refresh rate.
So if we go tapping through pages, like this,
- Great.
- Yeah, I love when the pages just turned block,
like you spilled thele over your paper
- Or coffee all over your laptop.
- Sure
Same thing.
- Who's done that before?
It's just less zippy.
Obviously the iPad is better at skimming.
- I noticed that sometimes, with the Kindle Scribe,
when you're on a page of just all text,
and you go to page with some images on it,
sometimes that text from the previous page,
will be imposed on the image.
It's a little bit distracting.
- That's one of the limitations of the E Ink display,
is that it has to refresh,
to turn the pixels all the way off.
One more note about the viewing angle.
If you look at our front cam,
you'll see that the iPad looks a lot darker
than the Kindle does.
But if you look at our overhead cam,
we didn't change anything.
They look relatively the same,
'cause we optimized the iPad for the overhead cam.
But that's really what it looks like from an ankle.
- I definitely prefer the Amazon pen to the Apple pencil.
It fuels closer to actually writing with a real pen,
on real paper
- For me, it isn't the pen that makes that difference.
It's the screen covering.
The Amazon Kindle Scribe
has a nice matte finish to the screen.
The iPad has the glossy finish.
The only difference between the Kindle Scribe,
and the other Kindles, is the ability to write on it.
In fact, the Kindle Oasis is an excellent Kindle,
for much less money.
But this whole writing thing is a big deal for Amazon.
Now, we're gonna compare taking notes on the Kindle Scribe,
to taking notes in the Kindle app on the iPad.
Shall we take a note?
- I would love to.
I'm gonna press and hold, on the screen,
and a little line will appear.
- Yeah, kinda like you're underlining, content is king.
- So I've got Wikipedia
but instead I'm gonna tap note up here,
and I'm gonna write "Genius."
- Similarly on iPad.
I've highlighted it, I can tap on it once,
and then I can tap on the little create note icon.
And now I can create a note.
This has the option to tap over to text note.
You can have the keyboard there.
- And here we can talk about real quick,
how you know, not great this keyboard is, the keys.
- Well they're kind of in the wrong spots,
and that's what really threw me off.
Notice how the Q and the A, and the Z,
are kind of aligned like a real keyboard here?
- Yeah.
- This is not the same shape as a real keyboard.
So your fingers, when you're typing,
don't really line up with the keys.
- Genius.
As I type in, " This is genius,"
the iPad simply translates it to the text.
- How does it do that?
- Using OCR or optical character recognition,
or probably some other Apple term for that technology.
- Lack of OCR is probably the most disappointing thing
about the Kindle Scribe.
You take all these notes,
you can't search and find them.
- You don't know what you wrote.
- Exactly.
The other disappointing piece of this for me,
is that you can't just write on the page.
That's really what I wanted.
I wanted to be able to scribble in the margins,
draw smiley faces, and other things.
Let's open a page,
just to demo the web browser on the Kindle.
- One of these things looks like espn.com,
and one of them looks like RSS feed.
- Let's say you wanted to read the news,
which I think a lot of people would think
you would have a good time doing timesunion.com.
- Well see.
You got a nice little headline there,
"Neil Golub thinks so."
I'm not sure I see that same headline.
It's like the "Mothy Python and the Holy Grail,"
opening credits,
where they've got all the weird Swedish letters.
"Well, it's in a nicknamer?
"How's, how about, so it's Snoo Itchen connected ERW."
- It can't handle the fancy single quotes.
That's not good.
- Obviously the text of this article is too small to read,
and you know, you pinch-to-zoom.
- And you end up zoomed in way too far.
It's like a reader view or something.
Browser settings, history, article mode?
Boom.
Haha.
- Hey.
- There you go.
So there's an article mode,
which makes it much better.
- Yes.
Well this is still the same issue, with the response time.
- Yeah, it's not as good as this.
And iPads, of course also have the reader mode.
Let's compare the Notes app on the iPad, to Notebooks,
which is a new feature for the Kindle.
This is a note on iPad.
- This is a note on Scribe.
I think the best part about this pen,
that beats the Apple pencil,
is the ability just to flip it over, and erase.
However, this is a premium-pen-only feature.
Basic pen cannot do the eraser.
It is a bit unfortunate in my opinion,
that because of the way that this display refreshes,
when you erase something,
you can still see a little trace of it on the screen,
almost like it was a real pencil, and real paper.
- Obviously the iPad can do a lot more,
in terms of optical character recognition,
in terms of doing crazy things like drawing,
like all this cool stuff we're able to make.
- If I do a circle, and press and hold.
It's just a
- Yep, an iPad.
It makes you seem like you know what you're doing.
Kendall Scribe pricing is a little weird,
especially once you get into the bundles.
So you've got 16 gigabytes, 32 gigabytes, 64 gigabytes.
Then you've got the basic pen,
which you can only get with the 16 gigabyte model.
And then you've got the premium pen,
which you can buy for all of the models.
Just right out of the box.
you get the Kittle Scribe, you get the pen.
Then you start adding accessories:
Fabric cover, $59, leather cover, $79.
Premium leather cover.
- Premium?
Ooh.
- A hundred dollars.
- I knew this was special
- Power adapter, in the box with an iPad.
Amazingly, not in the box with the Kindle.
You could buy one for $19 on Amazon's website.
But fortunately, Amazon has come up with a way
to sell all of this to you at once,
with their Essentials bundles.
- Thank you Amazon.
- Yeah, essentially they give you $40 off,
if you buy the cover, and you buy the power adapter,
along with the Kindle Scribe.
- So I want the works.
How much does the best everything cost me?
- 499.97 for a 64 gigabyte Kindle Scribe
with premium leather cover, and the premium pen,
and a power adapter.
Now you could buy a pretty good iPad for $500.
- You could buy for $500, lot of books,
and a lot of paper notebooks
- That's for sure.
When I set up the Kindle Scribe,
it asked me to subscribe to two subscriptions,
on top of my Amazon Prime subscription.
And it is the Kindle Unlimited subscription
for $10 a month,
and Audible for 14.99 a month.
There's a quote from Ars Technica,
from an Amazon internal memo, and they said,
"We want to make money when people use our devices,
"not when they buy our devices."
- So why is it so expensive?
- That's a really good question.
On the same article,
it says that Amazon's hardware team
is set to lose 10 billion dollars this year.
So maybe they're changing course?
- But are they trying to compete David?
- No.
- Are they trying to be a tablet,
or are they trying to be the best e-reader?
- They're trying to be a super cool Kindle e-reader
with a pen.
- With a pen.
- And outside, like we said, really no comparison.
Speaking of how the Kindle scribe is better outside,
we need to talk about battery life.
And the way the Kindle Scribe
describes how much battery life it gets,
is kind of misleading.
- It's very misleading.
Amazon claims that a single charge, for reading,
can last up to 12 weeks.
And a single charge for writing, can last up to three weeks.
But there's a huge catch.
- The catch is it's 12 weeks,
based on a half hour of reading per day,
with wireless off, and the brightness at 13.
But a half hour a day of reading?
- If you've ever been enthralled by a good book,
you know that 30 minutes is not even close to accurate.
- Can you imagine if Apple came out and said,
"The iPad lasts four weeks?"
Let's do the math here.
12 weeks is 84 days, times a half hour a day,
is 42 hours.
- Pretty good.
- But the iPad ninth gen,
up to 10 hours of battery life, for streaming video,
which is obviously using more power than reading an ebook.
- We will say that outside, you know,
you have to crank your iPad brightness all the way up
for reading.
With the Kindle, you can set it's a zero, you'll be fine.
So in that case, the iPad battery will drain super fast.
Kindle Scribe, not so much.
- Not to mention the fact that if you're at the beach,
it's gonna heat up your iPad,
which is not good for its battery at all.
It could damage it.
Kindle scribe at the beach, it's right at home
- Bring it in the water with you.
- Oh wait, don't do that.
- Don't do that.
You can do that with the Kindle Oasis.
- Not IPX8 waterproof,
like some of the earlier Kindle models
- The Kindle scribe is still not there in my opinion,
in terms of being a book reading/writing experience.
- I've been trying to think about who this product is for,
and I just keep coming back to like students.
Instead of paying a bajillion dollars for textbooks,
because that whole industry is a scam,
you get one of these Kindles,
you take all your notes in it, and whatnot,
and you bring this to class,
instead of a bunch of textbooks.
But the issue is that without OCR,
with the sort of disorganized way
that the notes are currently compiled,
it's just, it's not there.
- So the only way to get the notes from your Kindle Scribe,
to anywhere else, is by emailing them to yourself,
or just somebody else.
And it doesn't even give you the context, usually,
of the note on the page.
- Right.
- So it's not good.
Covers I think, are roughly equivalent,
in terms of their functionality.
I mean the smart cover's great.
- One thing that our editor Zeck noticed is,
there appears to be an eye here on the cover of this.
- I didn't see it the first time.
Yeah, I thought it was kind of a Rorschach test.
What do you see when you look into the cover?
What if you already have an iPad, David,
and you could just pick up an Apple pencil
for less than a hundred dollars,
and have the writing ability.
Is that worth it,
compared to the price of a whole new Kindle Scribe?
- Yeah, a hundred percent.
And if you're concerned about distractions on the iPad too,
you can set up a focus, you can set up screen time.
There are ways to cut down on the distractions on your iPad.
It's not that hard to do.
- Have we asked you to join our channel yet?
- We're supposed to.
- Scroll down a little bit.
There's a big button.
It's blue outline, white background, blue letters,
saying, "Join."
Click that button.
- Yep.
- And then click the subsequent buttons.
Yep.
- And eventually you'll be a member.
Kindle Pros.
Ridiculously better outside
- Superior battery life, especially outside.
- Pen fuels closer to actually writing on paper.
- Has a better viewing angle.
- Easy to erase notes by flipping the premium pen over.
- It's slightly lighter than the iPad ninth gen.
- It's distraction-free.
- Allegedly.
- And the pen is included,
though that premium pen is an extra $30.
But is the Kindle Scribe the iPad killer?
Maybe you love your Kindle.
You've been waiting forever for a pen
that you can write and take notes on.
You wanna pay the extra $400?
Who am I to judge?
I bought the Apple Watch Ultra.
- Overall I'd keep the iPad.
Yep. But if you're a Kindle person,
the Kindle Scribe is the best Kindle
Amazon's ever made for writing.
- That's the only one they've ever made for writing though.
Yeah.
- Yes it is.
- Ultimately, keep your iPad.
You wanna write?
Buy an Apple pencil.
And then, check out our
iPad OS 16.1 New Features video.
Lots of great new stuff you can do with the iPad,
that you still can't do with the Kindle Scribe.
- Except a real eraser would've left smudges
all over the place.
- Right, yeah.
- And there'd be all these filings on the screen
that you'd have to be wiping off.
- That'd be a cool feature
if you could like blow the filings away,
and it gets, you know?
- That's 2030.
- That refreshes the screen.
- Yeah
- That'd be nice.
- I think we'll have color
before we have.
- I don't know (laughing.)