So Amazon finally announced its color Kindle last week, the Colorsoft, and I've been putting off writing about it because I wanted to sit with my actual reaction instead of just regurgitating the press release like half the gadget sites did. Preorders are open now, it ships October 30th, $279.99 for the base model with the ad-supported lock screen (add $20 if those ads bother you as much as they bother me).
Here's the thing nobody seems to be saying loudly enough: Kobo did this first, and better, a month ago.
I picked up a Libra Colour back at the end of September, mostly out of curiosity, and it's been my daily reader since. $219.99, so sixty bucks cheaper than the Colorsoft, physical page-turn buttons that the Kindle still doesn't have, and it already supports the Kobo color panel that Amazon is only just catching up to now. I'm not even a Kobo person by history, I've bought basically every Kindle since the keyboard one back in 2011 (which, fittingly, is roughly when this blog started too), but the Libra just does more for less money and it's been out and shipping and in actual hands for three weeks already.
The color e-ink itself, on both devices, uses the same underlying E Ink Kaleido panel tech, so I don't expect the Colorsoft screen to look meaningfully different once people get their hands on it. Color e-ink still isn't vivid in the way a phone or tablet screen is vivid. Its more like newsprint got a slightly better print run. Book covers look nice in your library view, highlighting in color is genuinely useful if you annotate a lot of nonfiction, and comics look better than they used to. But if you're expecting anything close to an iPad screen you're going to be disappointed, and I think that's the part that's going to generate a wave of disappointed reviews once the Colorsoft actually lands in mailboxes at the end of the month.
What annoys me more than the screen tech, honestly, is the pricing structure. Amazon wants $279.99 for 32GB with ads, and then there's a $399.99 Scribe with color and the stylus stuff, and a totally separate $159.99 Paperwhite bump this cycle too. It's a whole confusing lineup now where five years ago you just picked "regular" or "Paperwhite" and moved on. I get that product segmentation is how you extract more revenue per customer, I'm not naive about it, but as someone who just wants a reading device I find myself explaining this lineup to family members over Thanksgiving every single year and I'm already dreading doing it again this November.
I will say the Colorsoft's design looks nice in photos, that new color scheme with the raspberry/black split is a decent visual refresh after years of the same black slab. And Amazon's ecosystem lock-in is real, if you've got a library of Kindle purchases going back a decade the switching cost to Kobo is not zero, library loans through Libby work more smoothly on Kobo than people give it credit for, but if you're all-in on Amazon already that's a real reason to stay put even paying the premium.
My actual prediction, and I'll happily eat this if I'm wrong: once Colorsoft ships on the 30th, the initial reviews are going to focus on how thin the "improvement" over black-and-white Kindles feels for the price bump, and there's a decent chance we hear complaints about screen uniformity or tinting in the first batch of units, the way early runs of new e-ink tech often have. I don't have anything to back that up yet, it's just a pattern I've seen with first-gen hardware for going on fifteen years of buying this stuff too early.
Anyway. If you're reading books mostly in black and white, none of this matters and the regular Paperwhite at $159.99 is still the better buy for most people, color or not. I'll update this once I've actually had a Colorsoft in hand rather than just comparing spec sheets, which is a thing I try not to do but apparently didn't manage this time.