Poll result: Kindle fans would love to see Amazon bring the Oasis back

When you’re looking to replace a form factor as iconic as the printed and bound book, design is everything. For almost two decades now, companies have been refining their approach to e-readers, improving not just the electronic paper that gives them their incredible battery life and comfortable-to-read screens, but also how the rest of this hardware comes together. We’ve moved from physical QWERTY keyboards and page-turn buttons to touchscreens and capacitive input, but is every move like this a step in the right direction?

Amazon just introduced a whole slate of new Kindle models, from its inaugural color-screened Kindle Colorsoft, to the stylus-equipped Kindle Scribe 2. And while that’s some very interesting hardware of its own, hearing about all these new Kindles really just got us feeling nostalgic for an old favorite: the Kindle Oasis.

We haven’t had a new Kindle Oasis model since the Oasis 3 in 2019, and that’s a darn shame, because in a lot of ways the Oasis represented a high mark for Kindle design. Sure, those were still the bad old days of micro-USB, but some of us still haven’t been won over by touchscreen page control, and sorely miss those old physical page-turn buttons. And while we spend so much time around smartphones that it almost feels like “bezel” should be a bad word, the intentionally asymmetrical design of the Kindle Oasis actually really worked well for us, giving you a solid grip on the e-reader and facilitating ambidextrous control.

That all said, we also realize that we’re some serious gadget nerds over here, and our tastes aren’t always going to align with mainstream opinions. Were we just carrying a torch for a design that the world had moved on from? Clearly, we needed some data to back up our opinions, so we recruited our readers for a poll:

Do you want to see a new version of the Kindle Oasis?

Words like “landside” get thrown around a lot when looking a polls, but here the results really seem to leave no room for ambiguity: With over 2100 votes cast, you’re solidly in favor of Amazon bringing back the Kindle Oasis. Digging into the comments, we see some begrudging respect for the progress Amazon’s made with its newest models feeling a lot faster and more responsive than the Oasis, while still showing a lot of love for its design and construction.

Understandably, some of you have taken advantage of the broadening scope of the e-reader market to check out some non-Kindle alternatives, with Onyx BOOX models in particular earning a couple shout-outs. But if Amazon were ever to come out with a modern, USB-C-equipped, maybe even color-screen version of the Kindle Oasis, there is going to be no shortage of fans lining up to buy one. Even with as much variety as Amazon already offers in its Kindle lineup, maybe a little more is just what the doctor ordered.