Kindle DX, now with 9.7″ screen
Remember me speculating about 9.7″ screen in Kindle 3? Well, the only difference is that it’s called Kindle DX!
Today Amazon announced availability of Kindle DX: Amazon’s 9.7″ Wireless Reading Device. It will start shipping sometime this summer and is available for pre-order now. As I’ll definitely would like to write a hands-on review of it I’m preordering one right now…
2 major differences in Kindle DX compared to Kindle 2 are: 9.7″ 16 shades of gray eInk screen that runs at 1200×824 resolution and native PDF support. Other notable new features include iPhone-like auto-rotate and flash-memory upgraded to 3.3 gigabytes.
Kindle DX is actually much anticipated “Kindle textbook edition”. According to Wall Street Jounal Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland along with 5 other universities will start piloting Kindle DX as a universal textbook. With 4 major textbook publishers (Addison Wiley, Prentice Hall, Person and Longman) on-board long with several smaller ones it’s expected that Kindle DX will have 60% of textbooks available when it ships. Larger screen would also be a bonus to people who are used to reading regular newspapers.
Here are all features and specifications of Kindle DX that I could dig up so far:
- Size: 10.4″ x 7.2″ x 0.38″ (Kindle 2: 8″ x 5.3″ x 0.36″)
- Display: 16 shades of gray eInk 9.7″ 1200×824 pixels (Kindle 2: 6″ 800×600)
- Weight: 18.9oz (Kindle 2: 10.2oz)
- Storage: 3.3GB (Kindle 2: 1.4GB)
- Battery life: 4 days with 3G modem on, 2 weeks with modem off (really it’s limited just by the number of page turns). This is pretty much the same as Kindle 2
- Connectivity: 3G wireless modem, USB 2.0 port and 3.5mm audio jack
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I personally think that the Kindle DX has the potential to do well in the academic market. If this sort of device had been available ten years ago (gosh… that hurt), I would have been all over it.
Nice post, I didn’t realize any of the major textbook publishers were on board.
It’s *so* close to being right. The margin cropping, the supressable auto-rotate landscape display–very cool.
But it looks like you can’t search, highlight or annotate pdfs. Which means for my purposes it just won’t work, because I wanted it for reading academic journal articles. I need to be able to mark them up and search them for particular terms to get full use out of such a reader.
Also–no folders. *Still.* Sigh.
That would be awesome but it’s not possible (yet).
It’s not set up to display color because they are using the e-ink technology which lessen strains on the eyes, increases battery life and makes the reading feel more like a book.
For reading, definitely Kindle is great at what it does but if you want a bit of everything, try a netbook (bit bigger but does all of those)
Having a physical disability, this device would have really helped me get around campus a lot easier. Hell, there were some days I simply couldn’t make it to class… If I’d had one of these instead of huge sack o’ book et. al. I know that I would have been able to make it class on those days.