Amazon has given the Kindle Paperwhite a new OS, which feels much more like a tablet operating system as opposed to the neutered and plain OSs on past devices.

When you wake the Paperwhite, you're now prompted to swipe across the display to resume your session. Once you hit the homescreen, it's much closer to what the Kindle Fire offers than the company's previous e-readers. Your recently read items are shown in a gesture-friendly carousel across the top of the display, while recommended items sit beneath them. At the very top of the screen is a general menu with buttons for going home, back, adjusting the display light, hitting the store, or searching. There's also a dropdown menu that allows you to dig deeper into settings and other options.

While in books, you can touch the top of the screen to bring up that persistent menu, and you can also use swipes or taps to move between pages. Long presses on text allow you to select sections for highlighting, notation, or sharing, and single presses on words will grab you definitions. There's a contextual menu here for making font changes; the company has added lots of new typefaces and generally made it easier to tweak the display to your liking. Instead of physical buttons for turning pages, you utilize the screen by swiping or tapping on the left or right side. Some people may find this jarring, but it seems completely natural to me (though I have been doing a lot of reading on tablets which use the same gestures).

Amazon also provides X-Ray functionality on the Paperwhite, which has limited use but is fun to peruse when you get bored with the book that you're reading. You can also search the web and Wikipedia from within books, and Amazon has introduced translation in a handful of languages (via Bing).

The company includes its "experimental" web browser here as well, which is actually capable of rendering standard webpages with some decent results. I wouldn't recommend using it for any serious browsing, but in a pinch it works surprisingly well.

There's one other thing worth mentioning; perhaps due to that faster E Ink display (or just simply good software), I actually found using the onscreen keyboard for notes and searching to be a relatively painless experience. In fact, once I got used to the pace of the screen updates, typing in even longer notes wasn't much of a problem. There is the occasional missed letter if you move too fast, but overall I was impressed with how usable the keyboard is on the Paperwhite.

In general, performance on the Paperwhite kind of surprised me. Compared to previous Kindle models and the rest of the competition, this reader just seems blazingly fast. I know that's hard to imagine for E Ink, but while using the device I was consistently impressed by how snappy and responsive it was, never pausing, stalling, or blanking as I moved from function to function.

Battery life

Battery life on the Kindle Paperwhite more than lived up to Amazon's promises. In the week that I've been testing the device, I haven't put the reader on a charger since the day I received the unit in the mail. Keep in mind, I'm putting the Paperwhite through its paces more than an average user would — including lots of network use on 3G and Wi-Fi — and I'm still blown away by how much juice it has as of this writing. Perhaps I'm jaded because of poor smartphone and tablet battery life, but when you don't even have to think about charging something you use every day for extended periods, well — it seems a little magical.