The Kindle Paperwhite 4 has only been available for just over a month and it has already received some early promotions. In the past week Amazon launched a six month free subscription to Kindle Unlimited when you bought the PW4, but it has since expired. The Paperwhite 4 also received a slight discount in the United Kingdom, but so far no other country has received a price reduction. Will Amazon put the new Paperwhite on sale from now until Christmas?
The Paperwhite 4 features a 6 inch E Ink Carta HD capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 1072×1448 and 300 PPI. Amazon is using a plastic-backed 300ppi E Ink display, but it isn’t E Ink Mobius; it’s the company’s own design and it is made of plastic, not glass. The screen is completely flush with the bezel and this is done because it is the first Paperwhite that is waterproof with IPX8 certification.
Underneath the hood is a Freescale 6SLL Cortex-A9 @800M/1GHz processor and 512MB LPDDR3 of RAM. There are two different storage models, depending on your needs. The first is 8GB which is twice the amount that the Kindle Paperwhite 3 employed and a 32GB model, which is ideal for people who have large collections of manga or PDF files. The Oasis 2 and Kindle Paperwhite 4 are the only two e-readers that have different storage configurations.
I know many people who were early adopters and pre-ordered the Kindle Paperwhite 4 or purchased it, once all of the reviews came pouring in. I surmise that Amazon will discount this new model once the existing Paperwhite 3’s are sold out, over the past few weeks the company is literary dumping stock.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.