After 12 solid hours of streaming to the same Bluetooth speaker, the Fire tablet still had a charge of 54%. I did the same test with the $49 Fire tablet to see how battery life compares. I thought it might be broken for good but then I held the power button down for like 30 seconds and that forced a restart and it’s worked fine since. Holding the power button brought up the option to restart but and the device would just return to the blank screen and nothing else. Even after a full recharge the screen remained blank. When I say it became unresponsive I mean it completely froze up. The battery lasted a little over 8 hours before the screen went blank and the Kindle became unresponsive. I also closed the cover so the screen would turn off (it seems to stay on indefinitely with audiobooks unless you turn it off or close the cover). I charged the battery to full and turned Wi-Fi off and connected a Bluetooth speaker and let it play an audiobook until the battery died. I wanted to see how long the battery would last on the new Kindle Oasis when playing audiobooks so I did a test.

Kindles have small batteries because E Ink doesn’t require much power, and smaller batteries also help make the devices lighter and more comfortable to hold. Some folks really like having audiobooks on their Kindles, but the argument can be made that Kindles just aren’t a very good option for audiobooks. You can also jump forward and back by 30 seconds. The audiobook interface allows you to select chapters, add bookmarks, adjust the speed of speech from 0.5x to 3x, and adjust the volume.

Once the first chapter downloads, you can listen to an audiobook while it downloads, but there is no way to stream audiobooks from the cloud. When you open an audiobook Bluetooth automatically turns on to connect to speakers or headphones since the Kindle has no built-in speakers or audio jack. On Kindles you can’t view the ebook while the audiobook is playing. With Kindles you can easily switch back and forth between reading and listening, and it keeps track of your spot, but Kindles don’t have immersion reading like Fire tablets where it highlights the text while the audiobook is being read aloud. However, it should be noted that Audible support works differently on Kindles than on Fire tablets.

Free kindle audio books