The new entry level Amazon Kindle with an adjustable front-lit display and an E Ink Carta display is available this week. Customers who pre-ordered one over the course of the past few weeks will have their orders dispatched on April 10th. New orders placed after this date will have them shipped out right away, but the shipping time depends on your location and if you have a Prime membership or not.
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.
The all-new Kindle helps you go beyond a book with Amazon’s newest reading features. Now, when you finish a book, it will automatically be marked as read in your library and synced across your reading devices including Kindle, Fire tablet, and the free Kindle apps for iOS and Android. With just a few taps, you can filter to see which books you’ve read and which you haven’t, so organizing your library has never been easier. The new Kindle also has Bluetooth for wireless headphones or an external speaker and has the Audible audiobook store. This will allow you to purchase audiobooks and listen to them.
Three months of Kindle Unlimited is included for free so you can enjoy unlimited access to millions of titles including stories from thriller author Vince Flynn, popular titles like The Selection by Kiera Cass, and classics like The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
This e-reader retails for $89 and it is very likely it will receive a number of discounts later in the year.
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.
