Amazon Replaces the Basic Kindle With Touchscreen-Equipped Model, Will Ship it on 2 October
The blogosphere is all abuzz today with the news of the new Kindle Voyage, but that’s not the new Kindle that Amazon has on the way.
Lost in the excited chatter about the Kindle Voyage comes the news that Amazon is indeed replacing the now discontinued basic Kindle with a touchscreen model.
Details are still scarce, but that screenshot from the German blog tells us that the new Kindle model will have a 6″ screen and a touchscreen. It’s expected to ship on 2 October, and cost 59 euros in Germany, or about 10 euros more than the current basic Kindle.
Update: The new Kindle has officially launched, and it will ship on 2 October. Retail is $79 (ad-supported), or $10 more than the model which was just replaced. The new device has the same screen resolution, a touchscreen but no frontlight or sound, 4GB internal storage. In many ways it looks like a slightly bloated Kindle Paperwhite, only with 4 weeks battery life and weighing about half an ounce less.
It will have the same features and abilities as the Kindle Paperwhite, and look like this:
There are no details on the screen resolution, and I still have unanswered questions (ohne spiegeleffekte?), but it looks like I wasn’t too far off when I speculated that Amazon might replace the basic Kindle with a reduced price Kindle Paperwhite. (I also said that the replacement would cost the same; let’s see if I got that right as well.)
If this listing is real then the mention of the touchscreen tells us that the new Kindle model will not be running the same software as the late and beloved basic Kindle. Instead, the new model will likely be running the same software as on the Kindle Paperwhite.
As you may or may not know, the basic Kindle ran Kindle OS4, while Amazon’s touchscreen-equipped Kindles ran Kindle OS5. Both versions of the Kindle software offered many of the same features, but Kindle OS5 was customized to support touchscreens. And so if the new model has a touchscreen there is a good chance that it will run Kindle OS5 and have all the same features as the Kindle Paperwhite.
Will it have the same screen resolution as the Paperwhite? What about the frontlight?
I don’t have answers to those questions yet, but I suspect Amazon is going to announce the new device shortly – as in, some time in the next few hours.
Keep an eye on the blog feeds; this story isn’t over with yet.
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