It’s been 17 years since Amazon first put a digital e-Reader device on bookshelves, and while the marvel of carrying around a whole library’s worth of ebooks in the palm of your hand never got old, one thing was always missing: colour.
Like Dorothy waking up in Oz for the first time, Amazon is finally ready to add a dash of colour to its Kindle lineup by introducing the all-new Kindle Colorsoft.
With a colour screen — but all the same benefits of E-Ink that you find in a regular Kindle — Amazon’s hoping you’ll ditch your iPads and paperbacks in favour of its new reading device. So, is it time to burn your books in favour of Amazon’s new reader? Here’s everything you need to know.
1. It has a brand new, bigger screen
This is E-Ink, Jim, but not as we know it. Standard, monochrome Kindles are great for reading text-heavy books on, but when it comes to anything with colour imagery, their black-white-and-grey palettes leave something to be desired. The Kindle Colorsoft however can display thousands of different colours across its 7-inch screen (which is a touch bigger than the last-generation Kindle Paperwhite Signature).
To do this, Amazon had to totally rethink its display technology stack, adding a new oxide backplane to the mix, and a filter that uses Nitride LEDs to assign colours on a pixel-by-pixel basis.
Add in “custom formulated coatings between the display layers to enhance the colour, a light guide with micro-deflectors to minimise stray light, and an ultra-thin coating in the display stack to improve optical performance,” and you’ve got a screen experience to rival a colour paper page.
Just don’t expect a display quite as vibrant as a tablet or smartphone — though backlit, the Kindle’s E Ink technology trades vibrancy for legibility thanks to its anti-reflective nature. And it also one-ups LCD screen tech with its…
2. It boasts excellent battery life
You’ll get eight weeks on average of reading time per-charge from the Kindle Colorsoft. Though that’s not quite as good as the three months you’ll get out of a standard Kindle, they don’t offer that slick colour screen — and it’s a world away from the day or two you might squeeze out of a tablet or smartphone charge. There’s even a sold-separately wireless charging stand, so your Kindle Colorsoft is always ready to be grabbed at your bedside for a deep reading session.
3. It’s perfect for note taking across your library
With a colour screen comes the ability to make colour highlights, and Kindle Colorsoft will let you make (non destructive!) marks on your ebooks in four different colours. With Kindle accounts syncing data over the cloud, you’ll see these colour-coded notes appear in your Kindle mobile app’s books, too. And, with 32GB of local onboard storage and access to the millions of titles in Amazon’s Kindle bookstore, you’ll still be able to carry around a whole library’s worth of books with you at any time.
4. It’ll still work great with greyscale text
Though the colour screen will excel with magazine and comic book content, it doesn’t stop the Kindle Colorsoft from being a great device for regular text-based books too. In fact, in some respects, the device works even better when reading non-colour ebooks. Early reports say that you’ll only get the Colorsoft’s full 300 pixel-per-inch resolution when reading in black and white (colour text halve the resolution to 150 ppi), and page turns are snappier in black and white, too.
5. Price and release date
You won’t have long to wait for the release of the Kindle Colorsoft. It’s available for pre-order today for £269.99 / $279.99, and will go on general sale from October 30th.
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