
Amazon Updates The Kindle Paperwhite
The venerable Kindle is one of my favorite tech devices. I owned the Kindle 3, but the obvious shortcoming was the lack of lighting, forcing me to use a case with a clumsy light attached. The minute the original Kindle Paperwhite was announced, I quickly ordered a couple of them and they are to this day one of my favorite pieces of technology. The Paperwhite added a “light guide” layer to the display to evenly distribute the light from the LEDs found in the bezel, which gives the e-ink display the bright white image and makes it much easier to use in dim or dark scenarios.
In 2014, Amazon released the Kindle Voyage to the US market, which is their highest end Kindle yet. It features a 300 ppi e-ink display. Today, that same display is making its way to the mid-stream priced Kindle Paperwhite which should give it even better text rendering. The new version of the Carta e-paper display has double the pixels of the outgoing model.
Amazon is also offering the choice of a new font called Bookerly, which was created specifically for reading on digital screens: “Bookerly is inspired by the artistry of the best fonts in modern print books, but is hand-crafted for great readability at any font size.”
Also announced is a new typesetting engine which is listed as “coming soon” which offers improved character placement. They have adjusted the character spacing and the new typesetting engine will do a better job of justification and hyphenation of break words to create more consistent paragraph layouts. Amazon states that this will let you read faster with less eyestrain than the current engine.
The current features like note taking and word lookup are of course staying, but will be joined by new features like Page Flip which lets you skim ahead without losing your place. I prefer to read a book the way it was written, but I know a couple of people who like to look ahead and see what’s going to happen so this will be a nice feature for them.
| Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Specifications | |
| Display | 6" Paperwhite display with Carta e-paper technology and built-in light 300 ppi, optimized font technology, 16-level gray scale |
| Size | 6.7" x 4.6" x 0.36" (169 mm x 117 mm x 9.1 mm) |
| Weight | 7.2 ounces (205 grams) Wi-Fi 7.6 ounces (217 grams) Wi-Fi plus 3G |
| System Requirements | None; fully wireless and no computer required |
| Battery Life | A single charge lasts up to six weeks (30 minutes of reading per day, wireless off and light setting at 10) Battery life will vary based on light and wireless usage |
| Charge Time | Approximately 4 hours from a computer via USB cable |
| Wi-Fi Connectivity | 802.11n (WEP, WPA, WPA2 security) Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) Optional 3G Wireless on Paperwhite 3G |
| Content Formats Supported | Kindle Format 8 (AZW3) Kindle (AZW) TXT Unprotected MOBI PRC natively HTML Word (DOC, DOCX) JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP (through conversion) |
| Included in the Box | Kindle Paperwhite, USB 2.0 charging cable and Quick Start Guide |
| Price | Kindle Paperwhite: $119 With Special Offers, $139 Without Kindle Paperwhite 3G: $189 With Special Offers, $209 Without |
The Kindle is practically the definition of a uni-tasking device, but what it does, it does really well. The battery life is one of the keys to the experience, and Amazon states that the new Paperwhite can last up to six weeks if used for thirty minutes per day with the wireless off and the display at level ten. That works out to twenty one hours of usage between charges, and with my experience that is likely not an exaggeration.
Size and weight play a key part in the Kindle experience as well, and the Paperwhite has a 6-inch display inside of a small and thin body, and it weighs just 7.2 ounces or 205 grams for the Wi-Fi only model. The 3G option adds a tiny bit more to the total.
The new Kindle Paperwhite starts at $119 with Special Offers, jumps to $139 without Special Offers, and the 3G model costs $189 or $209. Shipments start on June 30th.
Source: Amazon
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The SSD industry has been talking about TLC NAND for over three years now. We published our first post, Understanding TLC NAND, back in early 2012, but in three years we have actually seen very little TLC NAND making it to the SSD market. Samsung was an early adopter back in 2012, but aside from it and SanDisk we've yet to see any TLC drives enter the market. Silicon Motion's SM2256 is set to change that because it's the first commercially available controller and firmware combo with TLC support, which will enable companies like Kingston, ADATA and the like to use TLC NAND in their SSDs. We got an early reference design sample from Silicon Motion in for testing to see how the SM2256 stacks up with the competition, so read on to see our preliminary thoughts on the new controller.
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AMD Shows Off Dual-GPU Fiji Card At PC Gaming Show
Briefly announced and discussed during AMD’s 2015 GPU product presentation yesterday morning was AMD’s forthcoming dual Fiji video card. The near-obligatory counterpart to the just-announced Radeon R9 Fury X, the unnamed dual-GPU card will be taking things one step further with a pair of Fiji GPUs on a single card.
Meanwhile as part of yesterday evening’s AMD-sponsored PC Gaming Show, CEO Dr. Lisa Su took the stage for a few minutes to show off AMD’s recently announced Fury products. And at the end this included the first public showcase of the still in development dual-GPU card.
There’s not too much to say right now since we don’t know its specifications, but of course for the moment AMD is focusing on size. With 4GB of VRAM for each GPU on-package via HBM technology, AMD has been able to design a dual-GPU card that’s shorter and simpler than their previous dual-GPU cards like the R9 295X2 and HD 7990, saving space that would have otherwise been occupied by GDDR5 memory modules and the associated VRMs.
Meanwhile on the card we can see that it uses a PLX 8747 to provide PCIe switching between the two GPUs and the shared PCIe bus. And on the power delivery side the card uses a pair of 8-pin PCIe power sockets. At this time no further details are being released, so we’ll have to see what AMD is up to later on once they’re ready to reveal more about the video card.
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Available Tags:Amazon , Kindle , Motion , SSD , AMD , Dual-GPU , Gaming ,





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