Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsFaulty pen - Amazon should do a recall
Reviewed in Australia on 17 October 2023
I own 3 previous generations of Kindles, including Oasis, and I love them all. With the Kindle Scribe, I didn't spend any time researching it or reading any reviews, as the reputation of Kindle was out of question for me. I knew I could trust it, so I bought one with 32GB of RAM and a premium pen.
The device itself is actually neat - it's thin and light, and has a nice screen. If I bought it without the pen, I would have kept it. What turned out to be a dud is the digital pen itself. Any sketches or any words I tried writing with it looked like they were made on my other device that requires no Wi-Fi and no battery: the Etch A Sketch. Tried doodling a cat, and its whiskers looked like a big zigzag. The reason is simple - the pen keeps "writing" when it's away from the screen - up to 1cm away. I tried resetting the device, installed the latest firmware, replaced the tip, and even pulled the tip half-way out of the pen itself - nothing resolves the problem.
Another analogy with using this pen is doing #1 in the snow. If you never did it before, don't even try. But the experience is pretty close to that.
What's funny is that the box has an image of the writing that is impossible to make. The promotional video on Youtube also shows people writing with the pen, and you could clearly see on those videos that the pen stops writing the moment it leaves the surface of the screen. So the pen that came with this Kindle does not operate the way it is advertised.
Well, I had no other option as to return the Kindle Scribe the same day it arrived, and I've got full refund from Amazon, which I really appreciate. I guess I will wait for the v2 to be released, and this time I will be reading the reviews more carefully. I am still a big believer in the Amazon products - just can't understand how a product with such a fault could have been released to the public. Maybe the pens are supplied by some 3rd-party provider - not sure, but I hope that Amazon will figure it out and fix it soon, because the device itself is actually awesome.
If you ask me, I think Amazon should do a recall due to the faulty pens that this Kindle device comes with, or offer a free pen that actually works.