I still have an old Kindle and it still gets months of battery life. I occasionally read comics so this may get me to upgrade.
Until it decides to delete every single side loaded book you have on there, which they like to do from time to time. The only way to completely avoid it is to load all your content via email, which unfortunately only supports limited formats.
Well, good luck to Amazon trying to wipe my kindle remotely with black magic then.
It doesn’t have WiFi configured at all.
When it happened to me I was staying with a family member whose house I’d never been to before, so I didn’t have their wifi. I couldn’t believe it.
Some Kindle devices come with a built-in „free“ cellular plan. Maybe it was that?
The type of person to rock Calibre would probably have airplane mode on constantly. Mine’s been that way and I still have epubs sideloaded on my Kindle from when I first got mine all those years ago.
Second this. Airplane mode is on and books are sideloaded. However, if it hadn’t been a present, I‘d probably have gotten a Tolino (German/European e-reader brand that is identical with kobo) because they support epub directly (and yes I know the Kindle technically does that, too, now but wordwise n stuff only works if you convert them to kfx)