If you held the Kindle Paperwhite launched 6 months ago in one hand and the all new Kindle in the other, you'll be hard pressed to tell which is which. They both have six inch monochrome e-ink screens; They are both feather weight, the new one slightly lighter at 191 gms.
Both need WiFi to connect to the Internet and do it lightning fast. The controls are identical except that the latest kindle has a fractionally lower resolution than the Paperwhite and doesn't have built-in lighting. In three days of using the new Kindle, I couldn't really say this mattered e-ink makes the big difference from normal tablet screens, when it comes to sustained reading and who wants colour when reading a book anyway?
Yet the latest Kindle avatar is priced at Rs 5999, almost half the price of the Paperwhite and if reading is your vice, this is a steal.
And despite Amazon leading you by the nose to buy its books at the Kindle store, you can shun the overtures in the opening menu, click open the hidden 'experimental browser' and Google your way to whatever you please on the Net: email, online stores, travel sites or whatever.
By the way while Kindle book downloads cost from Rs 191 for the latest fiction bestsellers ( "Gone Girl" on which this week's film release in India is based) to as low as Rs 60 for some Indian books, they also point you at some 30,000 free titles, mostly classics out of copyright. I can see myself using the new Kindle for years without spending a single rupee at the Kindle store -- and I'm guessing, so will a lot of others for whom the best part of this Kindle is its asking price.
