The Amazon Kindle Colorsoft Essentials Bundle pairs Amazon’s color e-ink Kindle with a magnetic cover and a wall charger that aren’t included with the base Kindle. The Colorsoft is the first Kindle with a color display, which renders book covers, comic art, magazine pages, and highlights in actual color instead of the grayscale dithering older Kindles relied on. Battery life still runs into weeks per charge, and the screen reads like paper both outdoors and indoors. The cover wakes the Kindle when you open it and puts it to sleep when you close it.
The perfect e-reader for comics, magazines, and color media
The Colorsoft produces colored comic pages, cookbook photographs, children’s book illustrations, and highlights in color, where previous Kindles could produce them only in grayscale. The screen has the same paper-quality. However, it doesn’t have the high color saturation you would find on a smartphone screen. So, don’t expect the same pop you’d get in a glossy magazine.
The Essentials Bundle adds two accessories to the base Colorsoft. A fabric cover snaps onto the back magnetically and folds open into a reading stand, with auto-wake and auto-sleep built in so the screen turns on when you open the cover and off when you close it. A USB-C wall adapter completes the bundle, which is sold separately from the standard Colorsoft and saves you the trip to buy one after the fact.
Battery life depends on how much you read at a stretch and whether you keep the front light on, but the typical range runs from a few weeks to over a month per charge. The front light includes a warm-tone slider that dims the cooler blues in the display for evening reading without lowering the contrast that makes text legible. The screen also stays visible in direct sunlight, including at the beach, in a sunny window, or on a flight where window seats normally wash out a phone.
Anything in your Amazon library shows up on the Colorsoft when you sign in, including past purchases, samples, and Kindle Unlimited or Prime Reading downloads. Audible audiobooks can be played through Bluetooth headphones or speakers, so the device handles both reading and listening from the same library. The onboard storage holds thousands of books and audiobooks, which can otherwise eat up space fast if you load them locally.
The Essentials Bundle’s $175 sale price knocks $138 off its $313 list price for a 44% discount. It combines a color Kindle with the cover and wall adapter that the base Colorsoft normally ships without. The Colorsoft is designed to bring color rendering to the Kindle reading experience while keeping the e-ink battery life and sunlight readability that draw readers to dedicated Kindles.