Lacks both touch and color

May 29, 2010 08:43 GMT  ·  By

Late last year, the performance of e-readers, as a market, was found to have been quite impressive. Barnes and Noble was rather unable to meet the demand for its Nook and Amazon's Kindle was a best seller. This went to show how interested the general populace was in book reading and also led to analysts predicting a rapid growth of this market segment during 2010. More recently, Amazon unleashed its Kindle PC applications, which gives a wider consumer base access to Amazon's collection of digitized titles. This might slightly affect the general marketing performance of e-readers, but the enthusiasm remains.

An obvious indicator of the industry's faith in this product type is the LumiRead e-reader that Acer previewed a couple of days ago. Now, Amazon has indirectly offered an update on its future plans and, though they may not be as grand as some may hope, they do include future Kindle models with enhanced functionality and ease of use.

According to Bloomberg, Amazon does, genuinely, intend to offer a new device sometime this year, in August to be precise. This unit will supposedly be slimmer than what the company is currently offering, but won't exactly be a great leap for mankind. For one, touch input will not be supported and consumers will also have to make do without color. On the other hand, the e-ink screen itself should be more responsive and sharp than what Amazon currently has on hands.

“I’ve seen some stuff in the laboratory, but it’s not quite ready for prime-time production,” Amazon.com Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said about the possibility of color, on May 25, at the company’s annual shareholders meeting.

Touch and color should not take overly long to arrive, especially considering that Amazon acquired Touchco, a company that specializes in touch input, earlier this year. In the meantime, Amazon will have to deal with competition from the iPad, the Nook and Sony's solution.