Yay! According to the New York Times Bits blog, Amazon will launch its next-gen Kindle ebook reader on February 9. It looks awesome, and as a Kindle user and fan from Day One, I can’t wait. I still read the Kindle every single day and highly recommend the device, despite it’s still too-high price and tough availability.
Amazon.com will introduce the next generation of its popular Kindle reader in New York City on Feb. 9.
Amazon.com confirmed that its founder and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, would host the event at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.
The new device corrects some of the design flaws of the first model, adding round buttons instead of those strange angular ones, and smaller side buttons to avoid accidental page turns.
But the biggest changes may be inside the device. The new Kindle likely uses the new Broadsheet microchip from Epson and E-Ink, which makes the display technology for the Kindle. E-Ink’s chief executive, Russell J. Wilcox, described the technology to me a few weeks ago, saying that it breaks the screen into 16 pixel sets and can update them in parallel, allowing for faster screen refreshes and a generally more responsive screen. He added that the technology was somewhat analogous to putting a better graphics card in a computer and would help e-readers become better full-featured devices.
“It’s the same brightness, it looks the same reading a page, but it’s night and day for user activity for anything than other than reading,” Mr. Wilcox said. “If you are reading a book, you are just going to read page by page and it might not make that much of a difference. But if you want to do anything else with your device, zooming in, look up words, whatever, you really appreciate the speed. It’s a major change.”
More photos of the new Kindle here. Nice!
