At the beginning of July Amazon released the Kindle Paperwhite 3, which gives you the same type of high resolution reading experience as found on the Kindle Voyage. How does this new model compare to some of the readers that were issued late last year? Today, we take a look at the entry level Kindle Basic and the Paperwhite 3.
The Kindle Basic for the first time ever has a new touchscreen, all prior models of the entry level Kindle has had a D-Pad and physical page turn buttons. This model is only $79 and is very appealing to people new to ereaders or had really old models.
The Kindle Basic features a six inch touchscreen with a resolution of 800 x 600 at 167 ppi. The touchscreen technology is using Infrared, courtesy of Neonode. The fonts and overall screen clarity have been dramatically increased and in a head to head comparison with the Kindle Paperwhite 2, the Kindle Basic had a whiter background and crisper fonts, which was very surprising.
Underneath the hood is a 1 GHZ Freescale processor and 512 MB of RAM. Amazon has doubled up the amount of internal memory from 2 GB on prior models of the basic model to 4 GB. This in effect gives you the ability to store more books and PDF files on your device, without having to run in there and free up space.
The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite 3 has a e-ink Carta display screen with a resolution of 1430×1080  and 300 PPI. This is a huge upgrade from the 2013 model which only had 1024×768 and 212 PPI.
Underneath the hood is a 1 GHZ processor and 512 MB of RAM. There is 4Â GB of internal storage and the majority of your content will be held in the cloud. Â There is certainly enough space to have a thousand e-books on your device at any given time.
The main differences between these two e-readers is that the Paperwhite 3 has higher resolution, a built in light and the brand new Bookerly font. Â In the video below we document the hardware and overall e-reading experience to give you a sense on how they stack up against each other. After all, specs on paper are one thing, real world conditions are another.
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.
