Amazon has massively discounted the latest generation for today only and you can pick one up for $89.99. That is a total savings of $40 and this is the first time it has been so heavily discounted since it launched late last year. The Paperwhite didn’t go on sale for Black Friday and saw its first price drop just before Christmas. Today’s deal beats that drop by a further $10 and makes the newest Kindle Paperwhite the most affordable it’s ever been.
The Paperwhite 4 features a 6 inch E Ink Carta HD capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 1072×1448 and 300 PPI. Amazon is using a plastic-backed 300ppi E Ink display, but it isn’t E Ink Mobius; it’s the company’s own design and it is made of plastic, not glass. The screen is completely flush with the bezel and this is done because it is the first Paperwhite that is waterproof with IPX8 certification. This means you can read in the bathtub or at the beach. It is also immune to spills such as coffee or tea.
The 4th generation Paperwhite has a front-lit display with 5 LED lights, whereas the Kindle Paperwhite 3 only had four LED lights. This lighting system is primarily used to read in the dark and in low-light conditions. If you leave the lights on all the time, it can quickly drain the battery, luckily this model has a power save mode.
Underneath the hood is a Freescale 6SLL Cortex-A9 @800M/1GHz processor and 512MB LPDDR3 of RAM. There are two different storage models, depending on your needs. The first is 8GB which is twice the amount that the Kindle Paperwhite 3 employed and a 32GB model, which is ideal for people who have large collections of manga or PDF files. The Oasis 2 and Kindle Paperwhite 4 are the only two e-readers that have different storage configurations. I like the fact there is two different storage options, depending on the user.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
