The Kindle Scribe is finally a proper note-taking tablet and comic book reader

When the Amazon Kindle Scribe first launched, it got a mediocre rating from us because the software experience was not on par with the promising hardware. After a few updates, it finally lives up to its potential. The Kindle Scribe is no longer a large e-ink tablet with basic note-taking features; instead, it’s become a more powerful note-taking and sketching tablet, as well as a better PDF and especially comic book reader.

My most wanted Kindle Scribe feature is a lasso tool to select and move text. I use the Scribe as my article planner for android authority, but I am a disorganized writer. Too often ideas and words get mixed up in my head and then come out rough and messy on paper, so I wasted a lot of time erasing and rewriting while structuring my notes on the Scribe.

The new lasso tool solved that. Now I just switch to it, select what needs to be moved and move it. Insert a line to write more, reorganize bullet points, align ideas, it’s all easier. Better yet, I can shrink, copy, and paste these selections into notes, which I find especially useful for sketching. Random duplicates or quadruples like above become much easier with the lasso.

I still want Amazon to implement quick iPad-like gestures to insert a line or add a space between words, but this will suffice for now. Oh and if I chose the lasso tool as the default action for the Premium Pen’s button, that would be great too.

In addition to the pen and highlighter, there are now new pen types (a fountain pen, a marker and a pencil) in five different sizes. The latter two are also tilt and pressure sensitive, for a more realistic sketching experience. See the stroke changes in the image above, when I started with light, applied more pressure, and then tilted.

Like any good note-taking service or device, the Kindle Scribe recently added the option to convert handwritten notes to text when exported. You can quickly email them to yourself or view and edit the converted text and then email it to another address.

In my tests, the Kindle Scribe had no trouble translating my handwriting and even recognizing symbols such as ①, →, ↳, ❤ and emojis like 🙁. It handles all uppercase, uppercase, and lowercase letters well, but misses line breaks and some of my stylized exclamation marks and poorly placed arrows. It also doesn’t seem to like the way I write ‘&’.

I’d like to see this conversion as an in-note option, without having to export it first, but hey, this is a good first step.

At first I was surprised that I couldn’t view the pages of my own notebooks like a regular Kindle book, but that feature is now available. The notes overview is very useful when I want to jump to a specific page in my notes, but it also lets me insert a new page where I need it or move pages around.

Amazon also added subfolder support for notes and a “go to page” feature (which is redundant now that the overview is here and doing it better). We’re just a few steps away from my ideal note management experience — I’d like the option to move a page to another note, for example — but I’d say there are no major deal breakers anymore. The Scribe does what I need most for my notes and lets me stay on top of my article schedule and random sketches.

Given the 10.2-inch screen and PDF support, I originally thought the Scribe would be ideal for reading comic books. It turned out better than my Kindle Paperwhite, but the screen was still smaller than most comic books and my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Zooming in and moving around the page was also jerky. That on top of the black and white e-ink screen made me rethink my comic book use on the Scribe.

However, things have changed with the latest updates. With a contrast picker, I can now improve the readability of some very thin comic book graphics and speech bubbles. A new margin selector can remove unnecessary margins around PDFs to expand the content a bit. Zooming in and out and moving around a PDF page has become as smooth as possible on a slow-refreshing e-ink screen. And most importantly, a landscape view is now available so I can see comic books on a page width similar to A4 paper. Yes, I have to scroll vertically, but that’s better than constantly zooming in and out.

In three consecutive updates, Amazon has improved much of the Kindle Scribe experience. I’d say the Scribe has finally reached the state it should have been in on release day – all the essential features are there and the whole experience from reading to writing to annotating has been dramatically improved. I look forward to seeing what else Amazon adds; there is still a lot of room to grow with this line of Kindles.