Kindle Paperwhite 12th‑Gen review

The first thing I noticed is the screen. It’s 7 inches now - up from 6.8 - but Amazon hasn’t turned it into a tray. It still fits neatly in one hand, weighs just 211 grams, and remains thin enough to slide into a sling bag next to your existential dread and backup charger. The display is a 300-ppi, flush-front, glare-free affair. Text is razor-sharp. Even the footnotes in Victorian novels look like they were typeset by monks. What’s new is the screen tech - oxide TFT - which gives blacks a slightly richer tone and pages a print-like crispness. Books feel more bookish. And yes, it’s still IPX8 waterproof, so you can read in the tub without worrying your fan fiction will get drowned. If you’ve ever tried to fish a soggy paperback out of bathwater, you’ll appreciate this.

Amazon claims this Kindle turns pages 20–25% faster. Normally, I roll my eyes at such claims, but this time, it shows. There’s a new processor under the hood (still unnamed, because Kindles are secretive creatures), and it genuinely makes swiping or tapping to the next page feel snappier. Heavier books, which used to chug along like an autorickshaw up a hill, now load without protest. Navigating menus, switching books, or adjusting the backlight — it’s all smoother. It’s not iPad fast, but then again, it doesn’t want or need to be. This is zen-level responsiveness — fast enough to feel modern, but not so fast it feels like it’s yelling.

You now get 25 LEDs - 12 white and 13 amber. That means you can adjust the screen’s warmth to suit your mood — ice-cold clarity during the day, cosy amber by night. It's like having a personal librarian gently dimming the lights as you drift into fiction.There’s also a proper Dark Mode, which works beautifully at 2 a.m. when your partner is asleep and the only drama you want is in chapter sixteen, not from real life. That said, there’s no auto-brightness — a feature Amazon keeps locked behind the more expensive Signature Edition. Slightly annoying, but manually sliding the brightness bar isn’t the worst thing in the world.
Let’s be real. The Kindle’s battery is not a battery. It’s a miracle. Amazon claims up to 12 weeks of battery life, and while I haven’t had 84 days to scientifically verify that, I can tell you that after two weeks of daily reading, I’ve used up roughly 12%. It charges via USB-C now — finally. No more rummaging around for prehistoric micro-USB cables. Just plug in once in a blue moon, and forget about it.

The new Kindle Paperwhite is not revolutionary. It’s not trying to be. It’s evolutionary — smoothing out the edges, speeding up the turns, and adding warmth where it matters. If you already own the last Paperwhite, you don’t need to upgrade. But if you’ve got a Kindle that’s been around since before wireless charging was a thing, this is a gorgeous leap forward. It’s the perfect antidote to the modern attention economy. It doesn’t ping. It doesn’t ring. It doesn’t try to do everything. It just helps you read. And in 2025, that’s about as rebellious as tech gets.