Certified Refurbished Kindle Voyage, 6" High-Resolution Display (300 ppi) with Adaptive Built-in Light, PagePress Sensors, Wi-Fi

Let's start out by saying that I've never owned a Kindle before as I couldn't see the point, surely my iPad and iPhone 6+ were good enough screens to read off. I was only half right though. While those devices are good enough to read off, they aren't anything compared to the Kindle when it comes to e-reading.It doesn't sound like much but the difference between an LCD screen and an E Ink device is quite big. When you read as many books a year as I do, then you need a device that you can read for extended periods of time without headaches from screen glare. This device is just this. Thanks to the 300ppi text (print quality) and the adaptive screen light, most of the time it doesn't even feel as though you're reading a digital device. The only time you start to notice the glow is when the lighting is poor but even then the back light is subtle and adaptive so it never tires the eyes.Apple once lead the market in creating quality straight from the box. Other companies are catching up though and Amazon is no different. The box is sleek, well designed and something to help you get excited for your new e-reader. The packaging may not sound like much to most people, but a nice tactile box screams quality to me and I loved this one.The quality didn't stop there. The only other Kindle I have been exposed to before was my dad's basic one which is about 4 years old now. It's light but it feels like that's been achieved with some lightweight plastics that just didn't feel very nice or robust to the touch. The kindle voyage is all metal and glass which has a lovely feel in the hand. Even though it's still light weight it's barely noticeable even when compared to other devices like an iPhone. It is sleek, there is no rattling and the whole product just feels like quality through and through.The aspect that sold me on the Voyage over the Paperwhite is the Adaptive Light feature. I have to say I really do like this feature. It needs some tweaking from time to time as in the most extreme of darks it doesn't quite go low enough or sometimes it has a little funny moment where it can't seem to decide what to do, but after a few amendments here and there it works well to the point where you often forget that the backlight is changing at all because it works so seamlessly with the ambient light. This does wonders for eye strain when reading.The other feature of this reader that I could take or leave are the haptic response buttons. They aren't bad by any means, they do work, and I do use them, but they aren't physical buttons and you can tell. I'm the kind of guy who likes my touch screen gestures to feel like touch screen gestures and my buttons to feel like buttons. Making one look or feel like the other cheapens the quality of the product and feels like an after thought. This was true with the haptic response buttons. It sill feels like your pressing a screen in spite of the little buzz you get as feed back, so while they aren't all bad, they feel a bit like an after thought.Overall though this is a great product for a dedicated reader. It's light weight, it's easy to use, and it's almost easier to read than a real book. While I won't stop buying the real deal any time soon, I think that the books I am less interested in will definitely be on my Kindle instead of my bookshelf which is what I bought this for in the first place. It's a great product and managed to make a believer out of me.

One trick pony and Return of the prodigal son=====================================I am a confirmed e-reader, having given up paper books many, many moons ago. I love being able to carry my entire library around with me and I certainly don't miss the smell or feel of paper. My first Kindle was a Kindle Keyboard (3rd generation), bought around about five years ago and I loved it. I moved on to tablet-based e-reading (Kindle for Android) and eventually ditched the KK altogether about a year or two ago. I have become a little dissatisfied with tablet e-reading however; my Galaxy Tab's battery life is OK, I suppose, but any sort of intensive use drains it so that a recharge during the day becomes inconveniently necessary. The Tablet also holds many distractions and my reading rate and volume has dropped off significantly and the difficulty of reading on a tablet in full sunlight is also well documented.So, I picked my KK up again and instantly fell back in love with the Kindle experience. I did feel the need to upgrade, however, and decided on a whim to treat myself to a new Kindle.What's inna box?==============Not a lot. The rather lush-looking box is no larger than a medium sized paperback book and it contains a Kindle (thank goodness!) and a USB lead. There's no charger - this is sold separately, which may be an irritation to some, but then there can't be many people who don't have small hordes of USB chargers clogging up their bed side table drawers these days. There's a warranty leaflet and an instruction booklet. This latter is fairly large but, on inspection, the instructions are limited to a single full page diagram of the Kindle and a sparse page telling you how to turn it on. All the instructions are on the device itself.You look so sexy, baby==================First impressions are that the Kindle Voyage is SMALL! Oh, so very small. But it also looks very pretty. The subtly textured glass screen at the front is pretty much full width/height with almost no bezel. The reading area is slightly smaller, being the same as any other Kindle. The casing at the back is slightly sculpted and has a pleasant, somewhat rubbery, matt feel to it. The rear also sports an engraved Amazon logo and a tiny on-off nubbin. The Voyage could easily be mistaken for a small tablet and the overall effect makes my poor old KK look awfully dowdy.Turn me on! Connect with me!=========================Turning the Voyage on for the first time (it came almost fully charged - yay!) initiates a bootup sequence which includes an tutorial simple enough to be (probably) unnecessary for all but the most inveterate technophobes. It's also impossible to skip which annoyed me intensely - I wanted to get started! It then prompted me to connect to a wifi; the Kindle scanned for nearby devices and then asked for a password. If you can't connect to a wifi at this stage you won't be able to download any books, but it's easy enough to connect later when you ARE in range.I was rather surprised at this point when the Kindle announced itself as "Crookedmouth's Xth Kindle". I didn't have to register or even log into my Amazon account. When you buy a Kindle from Amazon it comes already registered, which is nice.My KK was 3G enabled which meant I didn't need to find a wifi to connect to - I had full mobile connectivity. That was really useful at the time, but I now own two other devices (my mobile phone and my Tablet) that I can set up as mobile wifi hotpots. As a consequence I didn't feel the need to buy the Voyage 3G this time `round. And to be honest, these days, the availability of free wifi signals in airports, restaurants, hospitals and pubs makes 3G capability even less attractive.I can read you like a book=====================Skipping forward a little, using this to read books is... well it's a pleasure. The Voyage's main selling point over it's next-in-line stablemate the Paperwhite is the resolution of the screen. Harking back to my old KK (167ppi) , the screen reso was pretty poor - rather like reading a book printed on crepe paper. I don't know what a 212ppi Paperwhite looks like on-screen but the Voyage is lovely; crisp and clean. The Voyage is also back-lit and the screen is, therefore, genuinely paperwhite.The Voyage is light as a feather and sits in my hand comfortably; I can support it with a couple of fingers and turn the pages with my free fingers. Page turning is achieved by pressing the virtual buttons on either side of the reading area (they respond with a satisfyingly haptic bzzz) or by swiping the reading area as if t'were a tablet. And,I repeat, this can all be achieved one-handed leaving your other hand free to stir the béchamel sauce, steer your articulated juggernaut down the motorway or "toast" a "perp" with your "Glock", yo.I do find the reading area a little small, compared to my 8" Tab, but the 6" screen is standard for all Kindles so I can hardly complain. In any case I got used to it pretty quickly and it doesn't bother me at all now.The screen is subtly back-lit and it also has an adaptive feature that adjusts the back-light automatically to suit ambient conditions. This latter is a little annoying and seems to operate unbidden. I turned off the "auto-adjust" feature and was much happier.Touch me up==========The Voyage is a touch-screen device and it does this rather well too. You can use this feature to swipe the pages back and forth, select text and type in notes on an on-screen keyboard. The touch screen is sensitive, but also both responsive and accurate.Creature features===============The Kindle Voyage has a wide range of functionality features, many of which I have yet to discover or explore. Some of these are available on Paperwhite and will be familiar to e-reader users and some will be new:You have access to dictionary definitions of the words you are reading and, if you're online you can call up the Wikipedia entry for the word of interest. You can also build a vocabulary list of newly learned words. The "x-ray" feature provides you with an analysis of the book that you're reading - this can be a little patchy in terms of the detail it provides but it is useful if you chance across a character (as I do) whose name looks familiar but you can't place. You can also link directly to Wikipedia (if you're connected to the internet) to research terms, names or places that you're unfamiliar with.The Amazon Kindle bookshop can be accessed via wifi and it is all too easy to add to your "to be read" stack. Fortunately, Amazon give you a chance to change your mind avoiding the need to repent at leisure. The bookstore is, as viewed on the Kindle itself, pretty functional looking but then this IS an e-reader, NOT a web browser. Indeed the Voyage retains the "experimental web-browser" of the 3rd generation Kindles. It works a little better on the Voyage but not much.You can organise your library into collections and synch your library across other Kindle devices. There's a nice touch that allows you to share your Kindle library with family members who have their own Kindle accounts. I haven't tried this yet but it seems like a great idea.... look, there's a whole lot of other stuff that the Voyage does. I (and you) can take these or leave them and exploring them is, I suppose, part of the fun.In the final analysis================The Voyage is the best of the best. The Kindle reading experience is fantastic across the range but the Voyage scores over the Paperwhite in terms of its superior screen resolution and its reduced size and weight. Whether these distinguishing marks are sufficient to persuade you to pay the mark-up is really a personal thing but I would guess that if you went for the Voyage, you're unlikely ever to send it back to Amazon, bitterly disappointed, to exchange it for a Paperwhite.I've added some photos to give a flavour of what you'll be getting.Kindle functionality offers an added dimension to reading: again, the Voyage takes this a step or two further on but to my mind this isn't a sufficiently marked improvement over the capabilities of older Kindle models so it's not something I feel the need to shout about.