Amazon has a silly habit of launching products without satisfactory names, choosing instead to just have the new product take its predecessor’s name. That’s definitely the story with the Kindle, with has just seen a product refresh. The new Kindle could be called the ‘Kindle 4’, but instead Amazon have titled it simply as the ‘Kindle’ and renamed the older Kindle as the ‘Kindle Keyboard’.
Confused yet? Probably the easiest way to see the difference is to have a look at the top of the page; as you can see there’s a Kindle on the left with no keyboard and a Kindle on the right with a keyboard. The Kindle on the left is the new Kindle; the one on the right is the renamed Kindle Keyboard.
Here’s a close-up of the new Kindle. As you can see, it’s noticeably bereft of the full keyboard found on all other Kindles to date. Instead, it uses just a few buttons on the bottom of the device, with a directional button and four ancillary buttons.
This makes the Kindle slightly smaller than the older Kindles, with more of the chassis devoted to the screen instead of the hardware keys, which were rarely used in most circumstances.
Otherwise, things are mostly unchanged – it still uses the same monochrome e-ink display as its predecessors, with the same amount of storage. Unfortunately, 3G isn’t available with this new Kindle.
It does come at a much lower price than previous Kindles as well, although this is balanced against a new edition: ads. These ads appear when the Kindle is off and on the home screen, but thankfully don’t appear in the text of the book itself.
So that’s the new Kindle — there’s a Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire as well, but they haven’t yet been released in the UK so we don’t have to worry about their nomenclature.
So, just to summarise: If you’re looking, for example, for a new Kindle cover, then you’d look with the phrase ‘Kindle cover‘. If you were looking for the older Kindle, you’d be looking with the phrase ‘Kindle Keyboard cover.’
If you have any questions about the Kindle, or are looking for a specific mobile or tablet accessory (e.g. a kindle cover with light) then let us know via the comment or Twitter or Facebook!