Who wants the new Kindles?
Amazon has just updated their Kindle digital book readers’ lineup.
Essentially the world’s leading online retailer is replacing their previous generations of Kindle with new products released in November 2024 and others expected to hit shelves in a few weeks’ time.
The refreshed gadgets include the Kindle Basic and the Kindle Paperwhite plus its signature edition variant. They may never make it to Tanzania or East Africa until sometime in 2025.
While the new Paperwhite variants just look as much as their older siblings, Amazon slightly adjusted the display from 6.8 inch to 7.0 inch and claimed to have boosted the page flipping speed by 25 percent.
And then there is a real new Kindle on the Block, this is the ‘Colorsoft,’ which happens to be the first e-reader featuring a seven-inch color display.
Kindle Coloursoft is seen as a Paperwhite splashed in a few shades of color.
Also on the lineup there is a new Kindle Scribe, which like its predecessor, is a larger screen e-reader with note-taking capability, or you can call it Reader and Writer.
Scribe is a ten-inch flat slate with 300ppi screen surrounded by new white edges which is designed to look and feel like real paper.
The writing part of the equation is supposed to work by using Amazon’s Premium Pencil that features a new soft-tip eraser. Maybe third-party pens may surface later, but this is where the retailer got it wrong.
When Amazon introduced the e-ink Colorsoft software, what they needed to do is place it in a larger Kindle, such as the scribe, so that people can fully take advantage of its various colors.
This is because when it comes to actual book reading, the experience remains a simple one, dark text against white background.
Observers believe that colors are a useless addition to any simple book readers, they only offer good looking page covers and that is all.
Kobo, which is Amazon’s biggest competitor when it comes to e-book readers, had previously released its color versions and it seems Kindle makers were rushing to put their own color gadget in the market without first pausing to reflect its functionality.
Reviewers on YouTube are all finding the new color Kindle to be okayish, slightly fun to hold but utterly unnecessary.
But if Amazon could have released the larger 10-inch Kindle scribe in color, then its functionality would have tripled and the added shades make sense.
The scribe would have been used to read color magazines and comic books. The Kindle could also have served as slate for drawing
Reading and annotating also go well with a color splash.
Still, Amazon has time. Maybe in the course of 2025 the company may produce a real larger color book reader and writer to make full use of its ‘Colorsoft!’