The Amazon Kindle

2009-08-15T02:26:00.000-07:00

Introduced in November 2007, Amazon Kindle is an e-reader developed by Amazon to allow easy access to a vast library of electronic books to be downloaded and read on the device. Over 90,000 books were available for download at launch; that catalog grew to over 160,000 by August 2008 and was growing by over 25,000 titles per month. Books, newspapers, magazines and blogs are loaded onto the device wirelessly via Amazon’s free EVDO network, called WhisperNet, and are published in a proprietary format for the Kindle. Kindle owners can also send files to Amazon to be converted and published onto the Kindle, and access blogs, newspapers, websites, and web-based email through the Kindle’s browser.

Kindle displays its contents via electronic-paper display, a new technology that creates a paper-like display for electronic text that is also used in Sony’s Reader product.

On February 9, 2009, Amazon announced the Kindle 2 which became available for purchase on February 23, 2009 for the price of $359. It has now gone down to $299. The Kindle 2 features 16-level grayscale display, improved battery life, 20 percent faster page-refreshing, a text-to-speech option to read the text aloud,and overall thickness reduced from 0.8 to 0.36 inches (9.1 millimeters). The Kindle 2 has 2 GB of internal memory of which 1.4 GB is user-accessible. Amazon estimates that the Kindle 2 will hold about 1500 non-illustrated books. Unlike the original Kindle, Kindle 2 does not have a slot for SD memory cards. This model remains available as an alternative to the newer but considerably larger Kindle DX.

On May 6, 2009, Amazon announced the Kindle DX, which retails for $489. It is the first Kindle model with an accelerometer, automatically rotating pages between landscape and portrait orientations if the device is turned on its side. It is slightly over ¹⁄₃ inch (about 8.5 mm) thick, has a 4 GB (3.3 GB user-accessible) storage capacity, holding approximately 3500 non-illustrated e-books, a 9.7 inch (24.6 cm) display with 1200 x 824 pixel resolution, and a battery life of "up to" 4 days while using wireless or 2 weeks offline. The DX adds support for PDF files natively, built-in stereo speakers, and wireless technology as fallback option for when EVDO connectivity is not available. Like the Kindle 2, it does not have an SD memory card slot. The model was released on June 10, 2009.

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The Amazon Kindle