Amazon’s new Kindle Oasis is all-metal and can play your audiobooks too

Ten years after Amazon released the first ever Kindle, the retailer is now set to release the all new Kindle Oasis that may be the product to tempt you to upgrade your ereader.

The upgraded Kindle Oasis is larger than last year’s Oasis model, now packing the largest screen ever seen on an Amazon e-reader at 7 inches. It's backlit like previous models and brings back adaptive auto brightness too, missing from the original Oasis.

It has an aluminium design that feels and looks like a departure from the plastic models we’ve seen in the past.

That design change has allowed Amazon to create its first ever waterproof Kindle, so you can use this in the bath or by the beach and not have to worry about splashing water on it.

Ten years on

If you do drop it in the bath when your hands are covered in suds, you’ll have a full hour to recover it as the Kindle Oasis can cope in 2 meters of water for up to 60 minutes.

One of the biggest upgrades for the new Kindle Oasis is that it comes with audiobook playback capabilities that allow you to play Audible titles directly from the ereader. This is something Amazon has dabbled with before, with the older models with physical keyboards previously offering similar functionality, but it's a feature that has been missing on the last few generations of Kindle releases.

It will work with either Bluetooth headphones or speakers, but there’s no way of listening with wired headsets here as there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack. There also isn’t an internal speaker setup within the Kindle Oasis either.

If you own both the ebook and Audible version of the same title, you can seamlessly switch between both platforms too. Amazon has said if you own an ebook you'll also be able to buy the audio title for only £2.99 (about $4, AU$5).

It means you can be half way through a chapter of The Girl In The Spider's Web on your train commute and continue listening from where you left off when you get into your Bluetooth enabled car, without having to scrub through the audio to find your page.

The new Kindle Oasis can be pre-ordered now and Amazon will commence shipping in the coming weeks.

It'll also cost less than the last model starting at £229.99/$249.99 (about AU$330) rather than the starting price of $289.99 (£269.99, about AU$425) for the 2016 model.

The cheapest version comes with 8GB of storage, while there's also a 32GB version that costs £259.99/$279.99 (about AU$360) and another 32GB with free cellular connection to download books on the go for £319.99/$349.99 (about AU$450).

Amazon is prone to discounting its products on Black Friday too, so we may see the price drop down in November, or at least some of the older Kindle models.