TL;DR: The Kindle Colorsoft finally brings colour to the Kindle lineup, and it’s a quiet but meaningful upgrade — covers and illustrations look better, comics are possible but cramped, and the battery life is still excellent. Too pricey for what it offers, but a glimpse of the Kindle’s future.

A Long Time Coming in E-Ink Land

I’ve been reading on Kindles long enough to remember when they still had those clicky page-turn buttons that felt like tiny mechanical affirmations: yes, you are moving forward in this story, one irreversible step closer to The End. Back then, the e-ink display was a miracle. Books that never bent in your backpack. Words that never yellowed with age. A device that could outlast a vacation without asking for a single watt of electricity.

And then… well, the tech just sort of stopped evolving. Every few years, a slightly sharper, slightly lighter Kindle, maybe sprinkle in some warm light for late-night reading. It was fine. Reliable. But it also felt like the Kindle line was stuck in a kind of polite retirement, content to play chess in the park while the rest of consumer tech sprinted ahead to the metaverse.

So when the Kindle Colorsoft was announced, the very first Kindle with a colour e-ink display, my inner gadget nerd perked up. Finally — the grayscale winter was ending. We could live in a Kindle spring where book covers looked like book covers, not washed-out tombstones. Where maps in epic fantasies had ink the colour of forest and sea, instead of fifty shades of grey.

The Kindle Colorsoft is here in its intended form. And it’s good. Sometimes great. But it’s also expensive, a little too small for certain dreams, and still very much a Kindle in all the ways you’d expect — for better and worse.

The First Page: Love at First (and Second) Sight

The first time you pick up the Colorsoft, it’s immediately familiar. This is not some radical, reimagined Kindle. If you’ve held a Paperwhite Signature Edition, you’ve basically held the Colorsoft. Same smooth, black plastic back. Same matte glass front. Same single power button tucked next to a USB-C port at the bottom, as if Amazon is still allergic to giving us more physical controls.

That’s both comforting and a little disappointing. Comforting because the Paperwhite’s design is rock solid — balanced weight, decent ergonomics, waterproof enough to survive a bathtub drop. Disappointing because for AED 1079, I was hoping for a bit more wow. Amazon killed off the Oasis, their only Kindle that felt truly premium, so the Colorsoft inherits the crown for “fanciest Kindle you can buy”… without actually looking or feeling fancy.

But turn it on, and the magic starts to seep in.

The first book cover you see in colour is oddly thrilling. My library, which had always been a uniform wall of black-and-white thumbnails, suddenly had personality. The warm reds of Dune, the cool blues of Project Hail Mary, the playful pinks of rom-com covers — they were instantly recognisable in a way that the old Kindle UI just never allowed. Browsing became not just easier, but more pleasurable.

And it’s not just covers. Maps in epic fantasy novels look more like they do in physical editions — you can actually distinguish rivers from roads without squinting. Travel guides and cookbooks finally feel usable on an e-ink device. Even highlighting in colour, which sounds trivial on paper, changes the way I annotate. My notes now look less like the deranged scrawl of a conspiracy theorist and more like a thoughtful, well-organised reader.

Colour E-Ink: The Good, the Meh, and the Weird

Let’s get one thing out of the way: colour e-ink is not the same as an iPad’s Retina display. If you’re expecting the rich, saturated pop of a glossy magazine, you’re going to be underwhelmed. The Colorsoft’s palette is softer, more muted — more Sunday newspaper than Instagram filter.

Black-and-white books do look ever-so-slightly greyer than on the Paperwhite. It’s not deal-breaking, but if you’re the kind of person who notices the difference between 300 and 301 PPI, you’ll see it.

Brightness goes up to 24 levels, with auto-adjustments based on the time of day, and there’s a warm light option that makes night reading gentler on your eyeballs. It works as well here as it does on the Paperwhite, and combined with the muted colour tones, it makes for a very “cozy blanket” reading vibe.

Where the tech flexes its muscles is with illustrations, diagrams, and — theoretically — comics.

Comics and the 7-Inch Problem

Let’s talk about graphic novels, because they’re the reason many people will even consider a colour Kindle. I loaded up Watchmen, one of my go-to test comics for any new reading device. At first glance, it looked… pretty great. The colours were subdued but faithful, the matte finish giving it a pleasant paper-like texture. It was like reading a trade paperback that had been left out in soft sunlight for a few weeks — still gorgeous, just not high-gloss.

But then you try to read the text in the speech bubbles, and the Colorsoft’s Achilles’ heel shows up: seven inches is just not enough real estate for a full comic page. Unless your eyes are bionic, you’re going to be zooming and panning.

The Kindle offers a “panel view” mode that lets you hop from panel to panel, but it’s clumsy, and I found myself abandoning it in favour of pinch-to-zoom. To the Colorsoft’s credit, the touchscreen is responsive enough to make this tolerable, but it still breaks the flow. Graphic novels are about rhythm as much as imagery, and constant zooming turns a fight scene into a stop-motion slideshow.

In short: comics are possible on the Colorsoft, even enjoyable in the right conditions, but they’re not ideal. If you’re a dedicated graphic novel reader, you’re going to want something bigger — like the 10.2-inch Kindle Scribe or, yes, an iPad.

Battery Life and the Great Colour Trade-Off

The Colorsoft claims 28 hours of reading time, but I blew past that in testing. With brightness at around 40% and mostly black-and-white books, I got roughly 45 hours before hitting low battery. Crank the brightness to 70% and read colour-heavy comics, and you’re looking at about 32 hours. Either way, that’s weeks of real-world use for most people.

Standby drain is impressively low — under 1% per day with power save enabled. It charges in 2.5 hours with a 9W USB-C charger (which, of course, isn’t included) and even supports wireless charging, a luxury most Kindles skip.

Verdict: The Colour Future, Just Not Quite Yet

The Kindle Colorsoft is a fascinating device because it feels like the first chapter of a much bigger story. The colour screen genuinely improves the Kindle experience — not in a flashy, Instagram-bait way, but in subtle, oh, this actually matters ways. Book covers pop. In-book images make sense. Highlighting in colour changes how you annotate. It’s the kind of upgrade that’s easy to live with.

But it’s also stuck in an awkward middle ground. Too small for serious comic reading. Too expensive for what is, in essence, a slightly upgraded Paperwhite. Not luxurious enough to feel like a true flagship Kindle.

If you’re a Kindle die-hard who wants colour and can afford the splurge, you’ll enjoy it — especially if you catch it on sale. If you read mostly text, you can stick with a monochrome Kindle for now and wait for the inevitable colour Paperwhite at a saner price.