A short look on the Kindle generations

No more than 2 years ago, Amazon entered a still small market at the time with their own product: the Amazon Kindle. They we’re planing to conquer the ebook readers segment pretty soon, with one of the best devices on the market at the time and very good auxiliary services. And now, two years later, they managed that, as the Kindle (who now reached the third generation) is the uncontested king on its realm.

The three Kindle generations: 1, 2 and DX

Taking a short leap backward in time and seeing how all started might be a little interesting, so here we go.

2007 – the first Kindle

The first Kindle

In the fall of 2007, Amazon announced their first ebook reader. It had only one real contestant at the time. Sony’s Reader (here’s a more detailed review of the two) . But it managed to kick its ass pretty fast. It had some strong points, like the integrated keyboard and the ability to buy content from Amazon directly via a wireless connection (only in US) , but it also had some severe lacks: didn’t support PDF  or DOC files, many of the primary features were quite money hungry (you could subscribe to feeds, but that would have cost you 1$/month per each feed) and was ugly. Having the support of a brand name as big as Amazon made all these fade though, and the first Kindle rapidly became a top seller on the US market.

2008 – the Kindle 2

Kindle 2

One year later, Amazon prepared the second generation, the Kindle 2, that came to eliminate most of the downfalls of the first generation, bringing lots of extra features too.

It had a similar 6″ screen, but with a better resolution and quality (could display more shades of gray). Designed was rethink from scratch, as the Kindle 2 was now slimmer and way better looking than its predecessor. Also, the Amazon books store grew , becoming the biggest collection of online content in the world. And all these without modifying the price: the Kindle 2 replaced the older model having the same price tag : $359 at the moment .

2009 – Kindle DX, bigger is better?

DX: bigger is better

Just a couple of moths after they released the Kindle 2, Amazon announced the Kindle DX, the bigger 9.7″ version of their ebook reader. It appeared in order to satisfy the needs of those claiming the 6″ screen was too small for a reader. So, Amazon complied.

The Kindle DX will start shipping at the end of this moth and we’ll be able to say more about it then. For now, we know it brings some improvements over the Kindle 2: the bigger screen with a bigger resolution, bigger internal storage, native PDF support , auto rotation functions and many others. Of course, the price tag got higher ($489) , but we believe it’s worth it.

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