Amazon announced last week that a new Kindle was going to come out in the first two weeks of April. This is the first entry level Kindle with a better e-paper display and an adjustable front-light to read in the dark. It is going to retail for around $89, which is a solid price, but the Paperwhite is a better overall e-reader. Will you purchase the new Kindle?
The entry level Kindle e-reader features a 6 inch E Ink Carta display with a resolution of 800×600 and 167 PPI. This is the first Kindle with a front-light display, which allows you to control the brightness using a slider bar. It has 4 LED lights that are on the bottom of the bezel and project light upwards, so it is not shining in your eyes.
Underneath the hood is a NXP 6SLL (Cortex-A9 @800M/1GHz processor and 512MB of RAM. There is 4GB of internal storage to house all of the ebooks you have purchased from Amazon or from your own personal collection that you have sideloaded. There is no SD card for additional storage, but no Kindle after the 1st generation model has had one.
You can listen to Audible audiobooks via Bluetooth. You will need a pair of wireless headphones, earbuds or speakers. 4GB is not much storage for audiobooks, so you will only have room for less than six of them.
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.
