Amazon Kindle Scribe Colorsoft 32GB Review

The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is the largest and most expensive device in Amazon's e-reader range: a 10.9in colour E Ink tablet with a stylus in the box and 32 GB of storage. It reads, it takes handwritten notes, and it draws. The question is whether it does any of those things well enough to justify what it costs — and the honest answer is that the colour, which is the whole point of a Colorsoft, is the weakest part of it.

At 404 g the Scribe Colorsoft does not sound heavy, and on paper it is not. In use it becomes tiring more quickly than the number suggests, because that weight is spread across a large surface area in a thin, smooth casing that feels more fragile than it probably is. Holding it one-handed while keeping fingerprints off the display leaves you gripping a small number of viable edges. The body measures 189 x 245 x 5.4 mm.

The practical fix is to stop holding it. Any form of propping it up — an official case or an inexpensive folding stand — makes the device markedly easier to live with, and is worth budgeting for rather than treating as optional.

There are no physical page-turn buttons, so everything happens through the touchscreen. There is also no certified dust or water protection, which meaningfully limits where you can sensibly take it. A large, expensive, unprotected reader is a poor companion for a beach or a poolside, and the price alone discourages careless handling.

The panel is a 10.9in capacitive touchscreen running at 1,860 x 2,480 pixels, or 280 ppi. It is sharp, front-lit, and both brightness and colour temperature are adjustable, with a light sensor handling automatic adjustment and an orientation sensor enabling landscape reading. As a black-and-white reading surface it is excellent.

Colour is another matter. The panel covers just 5.6 per cent of the sRGB colour space. That is fractionally better than some rival colour E Ink readers, but it is nowhere near enough to be persuasive: what you get is muted, broken pastel rather than colour in any meaningful sense. Blues survive best. Yellows only become vivid if the backlight's colour temperature is pushed to its maximum, and doing so muddies everything else on the page.

This matters most for the use case the size seems designed for. A 10.9in screen ought to be ideal for large-format comics and graphic novels: double-page spreads are not split by a spine, and zooming in on fine detail is possible. In practice the washed-out palette undercuts the appeal. Classic comics built on bright, saturated colour look like pale imitations of themselves. Work that leans on line, form, pattern and hard contrast — greyscale or black-and-white material — fares much better, but for that a far cheaper and smaller reader would do the job just as well.

If you are buying digital comics for a colour E Ink device, it is worth checking whether the artwork's style survives this kind of limited colour reproduction before committing to a library.

The Scribe half of the name is delivered by the bundled stylus, which lets you annotate books without damaging anything. For underlining, margin notes and coloured highlights it works reliably, and the results are formatted neatly — arguably a little too neatly. Freehand sketches can be placed directly onto a book page and saved there, which is a genuinely nice touch.

The limitations show up quickly once you try to draw properly. The available colours are restricted and can only be mixed by layering strokes on top of one another, and the drawing tools in the menu are sparse. The stylus itself is well specified, with enough pressure sensitivity to vary stroke width and a function button on the barrel.

The eraser is the problem. The tip at the end of the stylus is far too aggressive: attempting to narrow a single stroke or erase a small area can take out half a drawing. Erasing can at least be undone. The eraser in the notes app is no better, and even its finest setting removes more than intended — the behaviour suggests the stroke data, rather than the erase input, dominates the result. E Ink adds a second irritation: ghostly shadows of erased marks linger until the page is closed and reloaded. That last point is a characteristic of E Ink panels generally rather than a fault specific to this device, but it disrupts the flow of drawing all the same.

The reasonable conclusion is that this is a capable annotation tool and a poor drawing tool. Anyone wanting to produce real illustrations will get more controllable results from a graphics tablet, or even from a pencil sketch photographed and cleaned up afterwards.

Responsiveness is a strength. Page turns take 0.8 seconds in ePub and AZW and 0.5 seconds in PDF, and resuming a book takes 0.8 seconds. For a large E Ink panel that is brisk.

Measured battery life came to 41 hours 26 minutes, equating to 5,848 pages of reading. That sounds substantial in isolation, and for most people it will mean weeks between charges. It is worth keeping in perspective, though: smaller e-readers routinely achieve several times that runtime. Recharging is slow, taking 2 hours 57 minutes to refill.

Switching off Wi-Fi when it is not needed helps preserve the battery, and the brightness and colour-temperature settings are worth experimenting with — in low ambient light far less illumination is needed than the defaults suggest.

AZW, Mobi and PDF are handled natively. ePub works only after conversion, which is the practical expression of a broader constraint: this device ties you to Amazon's ebook ecosystem more firmly than rivals do. PDFs can be zoomed but will not reflow text to match, which limits how comfortable large documents are on the page.

Connectivity covers Wi-Fi 5 (ac), USB-C and Bluetooth. The Bluetooth is there for audiobooks, since there are no built-in speakers. Storage is 32 GB with no memory-card slot, which is ample for text — though colour illustrations consume it considerably faster than plain text does. A web browser and integrated store access are both included.

In the UK the 32 GB Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is listed on Amazon UK at £569.00 and is in stock at the time of writing. A 64 GB version is also sold at a higher price.

The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is fast, sharp, generously sized and genuinely useful for annotating documents and books. Its storage is ample and its stylus is well made. Against a field of twenty e-readers, however, it placed eighteenth — and the reasons are not hard to identify.

The colour reproduction that justifies the Colorsoft name is too weak to deliver on the promise of comics and illustrated books. The size that should be an advantage makes the device awkward to hold and unsuited to reading anywhere but at a desk or in a chair. Charging is slow, there is no water or dust protection, and the price sits well above what most people spend on a reading device.

It is a well-built product that is hard to recommend at the price. Anyone who mainly reads text is better served by a smaller, cheaper reader with far longer battery life; anyone who mainly wants to draw is better served by a graphics tablet. The narrow group left over — people who want a large-format annotation device for documents and can accept muted colour — are the ones who will get real value from it.