Color Kindle

The color Kindle picture that you can see to the right is a mock-up of what the Kindle 4 could possibly look like. It was designed by my friend and in actual fact just uses the body of the 3rd generation Kindle with a color magazine cover added to the screen.

If you look into the company that made the E Ink Pearl screen for the Kindle 3, you will see that they have already invented a color version called E Ink Triton. You can check out more about this on the E Ink website if you are interested.

One of the things that impressed me is the fact that this technology can display over 4,000 different colors. As with the screen in the Kindle 3, this new display can be read under direct sunlight.

As you may already know, the Kindle 3 was released for sale on the 27th of August 2010. You should also realize that new Kindle releases that have been made previously have all had at least a year's gap in between them. Therefore you can tell that the earliest that a Kindle with a color display will be available will be the summer of 2011.

But to be quite honest, I would suggest that it will not be until nearer Christmas 2011. In fact we might not even see a new Kindle this year. It could be 2012 before it is released. The Kindle 3 is selling very well so Amazon have no need to rush a new model to market.

The price of a color Kindle is still un-known at this stage. The cost of the new Electronic Paper Display alone added to a Kindle 3 would not account for a particularly large price increase. But we have to remember that the Kindle 4 will surely have other feature improvements besides its display.

Other features of the E Ink Triton display are that it offers faster page turns than their existing E Ink Pearl technology. Much like on the Kindle today, Triton offers to possibility to maintain color images on the screen even when the gadget is turned off.

We should also remember that the battery life of hand held readers that use Electronic Paper Displays is much longer than devices with LCD screens.