Amazon Kindle DX Portable eBook Reader Review - Introduction

Although Sony launched their first portable eBook reader before Amazon, as the Sony Libre back in 2005, Amazon were certainly poised to take this market by storm when they launched the original Kindle in 2007. The original Kindle was highly anticipated and sold out within 5 hours of it’s launch. Amazon, with it’s massive dominance in the online book supply market was in the perfect position to be able to create and promote an eBook reader. They quickly began to offer hundreds of thousands of electronic copies of novels and other books via their flagship Kindle Store. Although the original Kindle could only store 200 books, it was selling like hot cakes.

The customers were singing the praises of the excellent electronic ink display and the lightweight and comfortable design of the device. Wireless networking using 3G was used to download books to the device and the battery could withstand weeks of use, due to the revolutionary way that e-ink displays work.

Amazon did not rest on their laurels for long though. The launch of the Kindle 2 came in early 2009 and saw the device get a larger, better display, more capacity and a physical redesign that Apple would be proud of. The price of the Kindle also started to drop as more and more customers flocked to the device. Amazon also gained kudos by getting authors like Stephen King to supply new work exclusively on the Kindle device.

Later in 2009 came the launch of the Amazon Kindle DX, an upgraded device with a higher resolution screen, a built in accelerometer to allow for landscape reading and again a greater storage capacity; enough for 3500 books.

The Kindle continues to go from strength to strength and at the moment, only seems to lack WiFi connectivity, although the WhisperNet 3G network is more than sufficient for downloading books to the device over the air waves.