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.