I Can’t Believe Kindles Still Don’t Have This Feature

I’ve been using the PocketBook Era Lite lately since it’s one of the newest ereaders to hit the market, and like most things it has some pluses and minuses, but one thing that works great is the ability to adjust the frontlight without having to open a menu and leave the page.

You can swipe up and down along one side of the screen to adjust the frontlight brightness, and you can swipe up and down the other side of the screen to adjust the color temperature of the frontlight.

PocketBook’s user interface can be slow to respond at times (sometimes it takes a few seconds to react after you tap something), but swiping along the sides to adjust the frontlight is one thing that works really smoothly and quickly; you can easily fine tune the dial to the exact percentage you want.

A lot of ereading devices offer a similar feature where you can adjust the frontlight by swiping the sides of the page, but Kindles are one of the few brands that don’t have anything like that.

With Kindles, adjusting the frontlight manually is a multi-step process. You have to swipe down from the top of the screen to open the quick settings menu, which changes the appearance of the screen entirely, and then you have to manually adjust a slider for brightness and a separate slider for color temperature. Then you have to manually close the menu to go back to reading and see if the frontlight is exactly how you like it.

What I especially dislike about that system is it requires you to adjust the light without being able to clearly see the pages of the book you’re reading; it’s much easier to set the brightness and color temperature when you can see exactly how it looks on the page while reading, not while looking at a settings menu with different fonts and different sizes and a different texture they add to the bottom part of the screen while the menu is open.

Several other brands have the ability to easily and quickly adjust the frontlight without having to open a menu and leave the page—Kobo added that option years ago, and so did Onyx—but for some reason Amazon has never added that feature to Kindles. It’s a small thing, but it really does make adjusting the frontlight easier.