Kindle Scribe mini review

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Geektastic

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#305752 1-Jun-2023 21:55

I recently bought a Scribe.

I am a manuscript person - I much prefer the Mk 1 Pen & Paper to writing with a keyboard.

I bought a Remarkable 2 e-ink tablet and that is great - lots of connectivity options like Dropbox and so on which frankly I do not need. It has OCR as well which is...fine. By no means perfect.

I read a lot - probably 2 hours a day on average. My Kindle Oasis is by far my most used device, beating my iphone, MBP etc hands down. It is getting a bit long in the tooth - I have had it about 3 years I think. The battery no longer reaches 100% even if you leave it on charge overnight and it does not last much more than 10 days.

Then I read about the Scribe - a large screen Kindle I could write on. It does pretty much everything I want and cuts the number of devices in half. Bonus!

It's not cheap though but what is these days? So I got one from my old pal Noel.

Reading is much like the Oasis (although sadly no buttons to turn the page when you have melted chocolate digestives on your fingers...). The screen is awesomely large, extremely clear, well lit and the text is superb.

I have the Premium pen and the writing experience is really good - easily the equal, if not slightly better than, the Remarkable. You can scrawl on documents but the implementation is not perfect - the writing goes in an attached 'stickly note' represented by a symbol on the text: click the symbol and the text opens. So not a full recreation of writing on the pages of a paper document yet.I am sure that there are techical reasons why, but I do not know them.

Build quality is excellent, using recycled aluminium and plastic. Battery life is easily several weeks.

If you like to read on a Kindle and like the idea of writing in Notebooks or appending notes to your Kindle books, PDFs etc, I can certainly recommend it.

networkn

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#3083520 1-Jun-2023 22:45

I too recently obtained one. As I mostly read in bed, I prefer my Oasis by some margin esp because the Oasis has buttons for page turning.

As a writing experience with the Scribe it's exceptional (Premium Pen). The OCR is rubbish/nonexistent but my handwriting is awful. My phone (S23 Ultra) does a far better job of recognizing my chicken scratch. It's being actively developed but I feel it's very limited in it's functionality now. Can't save addresses to send notes to, doesn't send those notes as an attachment, though you can use the link to download.

The screen IS excellent and outstanding for reading, it's just too big and heavy for my reading scenarios.

I am hoping for significant integrations shortly. Dreams would be onenote/onedrive etc.

I wouldn't have been super happy if I had to pay for it myself based on it's current capabilities, but if they deliver on it's potential, then yep, I think it's a fantastic device.

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Handle9

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#3083541 2-Jun-2023 05:05

networkn:
I am hoping for significant integrations shortly. Dreams would be onenote/onedrive etc.

I just got an email about Word integration

Quinny

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#3083742 2-Jun-2023 11:29

I managed to get the top-end one (Premium pen and 55gig), and despite trying to fill it have failed miserably, but then it's all epub, not pdf. Sideloading works ok, but you have to add to collections now manually and cannot with Calibre - only add the books themselves. Once you add to unsorted, it is a single click to add to collections (so works fine, just not as easy)

This is a godsend https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle/pc and so useful.

Overall mega happy, especially as it was via a friend (who had it for review), and I only paid half the full price in NZ as a result. Had zero issues where the Kobo Sage would often pop up and say the books were protected (they are not), and I would need to reboot to clear. The battery is good (incredible vs the Sage). I am getting a couple of weeks of heavy reading.

I have eye issues after 9 eye surgeries, and being able to have large text on the big screen is fantastic and the best thing. I am using Caecilla at 11, getting about 7 words a line so it no longer feels odd to read as it does on a smaller reader. If you need bigger text give the Scribe a try.

Not used the pen much as bought it purely to replace the iPad Pro 11 I was using and it has done that.