Amazon Kindle 07/13/2009
 
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In many ways, the Kindle is similar to the Sony Reader. At 10.3 ounces, the Kindle weighs about an ounce more and is slightly bigger, measuring 7.5 inches high by 5.3 inches wide by 0.7 inch deep. But both devices have 4.9-by-3.6-inch (6-inch diagonal), 600 x 800-pixel screens that use E Ink technology, which serves to make the letters and words on the screen look more printlike in their appearance--it's quite impressive if you haven't seen the technology in action before. Technically, it's an electrophoretic display, which Wikipedia describes as "an information display that forms visible images by rearranging charged pigment particles using an applied electric field." The Kindle's screen has 4 scales of gray and 167 pixels per inch, while the Sony's has 8 scales of gray and 170 pixels per inch, which means the Sony offers a little more in the way of contrast and is slightly easier to read.

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.