Amazon Just Launched a Color Kindle for the First Time

After years of producing black-and-white e-ink readers, Amazon just released a color Kindle, the Kindle Colorsoft. It shares all its features with the regular Kindle, including the same contrast, page-turning speed, auto-adjusting front light, and weeks-long battery life. The only new development is the addition of color. The Colorsoft is now available to order for $279.

Looking at the images shared by the e-commerce giant, I find the colors on the new Kindle look very subtle and muted (in the best way possible). They don’t jump at you or come off as overly vibrant. I’m sure this is part of the company’s efforts to keep the overall experience of using a Kindle easy on your eyes.

Your books will still appear in their standard black font on white paper, so what is the color for? The color will appear in three places: book covers in your Kindle Library or the Store, the images in your books, and new color highlights you can add to your books and easily look up later.

Amazon says, “Everything about Kindle Colorsoft was meticulously designed to deliver rich, paper-like color.” It uses an oxide backplane with custom waveforms for fast performance and features a new light guide with nitride LEDs. These LEDs work together with certain algorithms to deliver rich color and brightness. According to the claims, you can zoom into images without worrying about pixelation.

The new Kindle Colorsoft has an eight-week battery life, wireless charging, and waterproofness, so you can easily take it in the shower or to the beach.

Amazon gave its Kindle lineup a massive revamp with three more changes: a new Kindle Scribe offering a Kindle and a notebook in one device, the fastest Paperwhite Kindle yet, and a new entry-level Kindle.

The Kindle Scribe comes with a Premium Pen for note-taking. The Pen has been designed to offer a pencil-like experience with the same heft, balance, and eraser tip. The Scribe’s 300ppi delivers a crisp canvas for jotting down thoughts, making notes on top of book pages, summarizing texts into bullet points, and so on.

Amazon’s best-selling Kindle, the Paperwhite, has also received some updates. It’s been given 25% faster page turns, which benefits the Kindle Library or the Store with a more responsive experience. It’s also been bumped up to seven inches but is still the slimmest Kindle on the market, with up to an impressive three-month battery life.

A new entry-level Kindle has also joined the lineup in a gorgeous Matcha color that I’m very tempted to get my hands on. Like the Boox Palma, this one can easily fit in the palm of your hand or slide in your back pocket. It lasts weeks on a single charge and features 16GB storage for your books.