The Kindle Scribe comes with a fantastic 300-PPI, 10.2-inch display that is evenly lit and perfect for large-format reading. The writing experience is also very pleasant and natural, and you can choose from 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB options. The battery can last up to 10 to 12 weeks. The Scribe comes with a stylus, and you can pay $30 extra for the Premium version, which offers better precision and an eraser feature. It's 0.22 inches thick.
The E Ink tablet looks and feels like an extra-large Kindle Paperwhite or Oasis, although it lacks the physical page-turning buttons of Amazon's premium e-reader. Words look crisp and clear, while the device itself is fast and responsive. You can access Audible via Bluetooth.
But the Scribe's software limitations keep this device from soaring. The Scribe's notebooks are easy to use, but lacking in features compared to other E Ink tablets. You can export your notebooks via email, but there's no Dropbox or any other third-party support. There are 18 notebook templates available, including six lined options, graphing paper, musical notation and to-do lists. All of that is great, but these notebooks lack any smart features. For example, there's no way to insert equations or convert your handwriting to text.
Similarly, writing in books and documents is too limited to be useful to serious highlighters and doodlers. That's because Amazon doesn't actually let you write directly on the page in anything other than a PDF. Instead, you'll need to write on "sticky notes" if you want to handwrite a note in a book or even a Word Doc. Not only does this prevent you from scribbling in the margins of books, but it also means you'll need to take a separate action to start writing at all.
The sticky notes are then collected automatically in your Notes and Highlights section, where they are presented without any of the context in which you wrote them. It does allow you to jump to the page on which a note was written by tapping on your markings. This is great in theory, but is confusing if you have more than one note on each page, as it doesn't pinpoint the exact location where the note was created. The Scribe also doesn't let you write any kind of notes at all on manga, comics, graphic novels, magazines or newspapers.
Currently, you can write directly on the page in PDFs, but the experience isn't great. The pen itself works well, but dealing with documents is more difficult than it should be. When you're in a PDF, you aren't able to adjust the font size or layout, so instead you have to pinch to zoom to enlarge or reposition the document. That part works well, and it's not too hard to find a level that works best for you. Once you're positioned in your PDF, you can't stay there. The Scribe makes it impossible to maintain your current zoom levels from one page to the next. Instead, you have to zoom all the way out again to swipe to the next page, just to reposition it all over again. This is a huge pain and makes reading long PDFs cumbersome and frustrating.
Ultimately, the Scribe is great if you want a large-screen e-reader or are eager to handwrite sticky notes in Amazon books. It just isn't quite good enough at either PDFs or in-line note-taking to recommend it as anything other than a gigantic, but excellent, Kindle.
The good news is Amazon is slated to release the next version of its Kindle Scribe on Dec. 4, which packs new AI-enhanced features that let you attach hand-written notes to text and save comments in the margins. Another feature converts your handwriting into legible, easy-to-read script. The base model of this second-gen Scribe comes with 16GB of storage and costs $400, or $20 more than the original. It'll also come in 32GB and 64GB options. And if you'd rather buy the original 2022 Kindle Scribe, Amazon has said those new AI-powered features should arrive there, too.
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