Well, it finally happened. After years of waiting and requests, Amazon debuted the $280 Kindle Colorsoft, its first ereader with a color display. The company’s ereaders have dominated this space since the original Kindle came out 17 years ago, but in this case, it feels like Amazon is playing catch-up. Color E Ink displays aren’t novel: we’ve tested and reviewed a number of color ereaders and E Ink tablets from Kobo, Boox and reMarkable in recent years. But Amazon is essentially trying to pull an Apple with the Colorsoft: with claims that color E Ink technology just wasn’t good enough to put into a Kindle until now, Amazon’s promising the Colorsoft gets this implementation right thanks in part to the custom tweaks it made to the display. And, unsurprisingly, Amazon’s ready to charge you a premium for it. So is it all it’s cracked up to be? As you might suspect, the answer isn’t as simple as yes or no.

Update 11/4/24, 11:54am ET: There have been multiple reports of Kindle Colorsoft owners seeing a yellow band at the bottom of their ereader’s display. My review unit was not affected during the time I spent testing the Colorsoft, but upon checking this morning, it has appeared for me, too. I reached out to Amazon for comment and a spokesperson told Engadget: “We’re aware of a small number of reports from customers who see a yellow band along the bottom of the display. We take the quality of our products seriously and are looking into it. If customers notice this on their device, they can reach out to our customer service team.”

Screen technology and comparisons

Let’s get the tech details squared away first. The Kindle Colorsoft’s seven-inch screen is based on E Ink Kaleido 3 technology, but a representative from the Kindle team explained to me that they developed a custom display stack for this device. That means they made quite a few changes to the tech in order to achieve things like higher-contrast pigments and improved speeds overall. The Colorsoft’s custom oxide backplane uses 24 driving volts to move pigments around more quickly and it helps those pigments appear with better contrast. Nitride LEDs enhance colors and brightness, and a custom coating in between the display’s layers helps focus light through each pigment so there’s less color mixing. Some of the same tech helps make page-turns quicker and supposedly reduces excessively noticeable screen refreshing when you go from one color page to another, or pinch-and-zoom on an image.

Engadget / Amazon

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The Kindle Colorsoft (finally) brings color to Amazon’s ereader lineup. It’s a solid premium ereader that will be ideal for those who primarily read things like comics, graphic novels and other material best experienced in full-color glory.

Pros

• Color on a Kindle, finally!
• Quick page-turns and load times
• Pinch-to-zoom feature lets you get closer to details
• Auto-adjusting front light
• No lock screen ads by default

Cons

• Expensive
• Screen has a noticeable blue skew to it when the warm light is off
• Slight reduction in sharpness and contrast when reading black-and-white text

$280 at Amazon

That’s all to say that Amazon would like you to believe that this E Ink Kaleido 3 screen is not like the other girls in this space, and while I do not doubt the Kindle team’s efforts, the differences are not as dramatic as the story would suggest. Until Kobo updates the Sage with color, the closest competitor to the $280 Kindle Colorsoft is the $220 Kobo Libra Colour (in size, platform and overall experience), so I did a lot of side-by-side comparisons of the two.

The biggest difference I saw was that the Kobo’s screen skews warmer than the Kindle’s; I kicked the brightness up to the maximum and turned all warm/natural light settings down to zero on both devices and the difference was noticeable, regardless of if the displays were showing color images, black-and-white text or a mix of the two. This would suggest that the Kindle will show more accurate colors more often since there’s less of a warm lean to its display.

But on the flip side, the Kindle screen’s blue tint was just as noticeable, particularly in low-light situations (like a dark office or a dimly lit living room). At max brightness with warmth down to zero, the Kindle’s screen was borderline uncomfortable to read in those environments — but all it took was a slight adjustment to warmth level four (out of 24) to get it to match the Kobo’s display in warmth almost exactly (at least to my eyes). That made it more comfortable to stare at in dark spaces. I also compared the Colorsoft’s screen to my personal Kindle Paperwhite (previous generation) and the blue skew was noticeable there too.

Ultimately, how much warm or cool light you prefer while reading is up to personal taste. My preferences would lead me to adjust the warmth on the Kindle to be a bit higher than zero, mimicking that of the Kobo. In an unscientific poll of the Engadget staff, both in person and with device photos, everybody preferred the screen on the Kobo. I think the slight added warmth in Kobo’s screen makes colors appear a bit more saturated and more inviting overall. It also gets close to mimicking the look of actual physical pages (as much as one of these devices could, at least), and that’s the experience I’m going for when I read pretty much anything. But I could understand why some hardcore comic fans would want to start off with the most color-accurate baseline as possible, and then adjust from there to fit their preferences.

In addition to adjusting the warm light, the Kindle Colorsoft has vivid mode, which “enhances color in less saturated images.” For the sake of efficacy, most of my time was spent in standard mode when testing the Colorsoft. But in trying out vivid mode, I noticed that its enhanced saturation was most noticeable in warm-toned images: reds appeared ever-so-slightly more striking, while oranges and yellows had a more bronze effect and the like. But I had to turn vivid mode on and off a few times to clock the effect because it’s quite subtle.

Then there’s the question of actually reading words on the Colorsoft. Even the Kindle team representative I spoke with acknowledged that, due to the extra physical layer in the screen that enables color, one might notice a bit less sharpness and contrast in black-and-white text on the Colorsoft’s screen. That’s not unique to this particular Kindle — every color ereader will have this issue to some degree.

When comparing the text-only experience of the Kindle Colorsoft to that of the Kobo Libra Colour, I found both to be quite good and comparable to one another. Where there’s a bigger possibility for discrepancies is in a comparison of the Colorsoft to, say, the new Kindle Paperwhite. I did not have the latter device to compare to, but I did have my personal, previous-generation Paperwhite, and the difference was ever so slight, with the standard Paperwhite having the (small) upper hand in the contrast and sharpness departments.

Reading experience

The color screen is the most consequential thing about the Kindle Colorsoft, and chances are if you’ve had a Kindle in the past, the reading experience on this new device will feel quite familiar. The Kindle UI hasn’t changed much, still dividing the main screen into Home and Library options. The former is basically a space for Amazon to serve you personalized book recommendations and promote new Kindle releases, while the latter shows your entire digital library including books, documents, Audible audiobooks and library loans. The Library page is striking in color and there is something undeniably satisfying about seeing all of your title covers in full-color glory.

While reading a book, you can still customize and save different themes with fonts, font sizes and page layouts that best suit your preferences. You still have the option to quickly navigate within a title by page, location, chapter and even popular highlights. Page turns are speedy and will likely be an improvement for anyone coming from an older Kindle or other ereader.

Annotations and your own highlights are collected in the same place for easy reference, and with the latter, you can filter by highlight color as well. You have four colors to choose from on the Colorsoft — orange, yellow, blue and pink — so if you use the yellow highlighter to mark favorite quotes, you can then filter by just that color. Note that all highlighting and note-taking must be done with your fingers because, unlike the Kindle Scribe, the Colorsoft has no stylus support.

The pinch-to-zoom feature on the Colorsoft is good for those who read a lot of graphic novels and comics. Amazon developed a custom algorithm to make this motion as smooth as possible, and it’s a pretty good experience, albeit not a unique one. You can also pinch to zoom on the Kobo Libra Colour, which mostly helps get in closer to comic panels to read small text or better see minute details.

On both devices, there are full-screen refreshes when you pinch to zoom on color images and the speed of completion is roughly the same. I also found image quality to be quite similar as well, and it’s worth noting that art style can skew your impression of an image’s quality. A comic that employs clean, distinct lines compared to one that’s more grungy and watercolor-like will always come off more crisp.

The Colorsoft, like the regular Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition, also has an auto-adjusting front light that promises to illuminate the display just right depending on if you’re reading outside on a sunny day, in the dark cabin of an airplane or anywhere else. It’s a nice hardware perk to have and, with the feature turned on, removes much of manual fiddling that some might find annoying to do when they take their Kindle into different environments.

The competition

While we already went through the screen comparisons for the $280 Kindle Colorsoft and the $220 Kobo Libra Colour, there are plenty of other differences between the two that you should consider when picking your next ereader. I’ve added a spec list below to break down the basics, and the most consequential to me are the fact that the Kobo has page-turn buttons and stylus support.

The former is really a matter of preference — you either love physical buttons or you find no use for them — but the latter is pure added value even if you do have to purchase the $70 Kobo stylus separately. It essentially allows you to turn the Libra Colour into a makeshift Kobo Sage or Kindle Scribe, which could be useful for anyone in academia (students and educators alike) or anyone who just loves the feeling of putting pen to “paper.” Meanwhile, the Kindle has the upper hand in its wireless charging capabilities and its slightly cleaner flush-front design.

When it comes to actual content available on Kindle and Kobo devices, the libraries you can purchase from on both are vast: both have ebooks and audiobooks available, and both the Colorsoft and Libra Colour support Bluetooth, so you can listen to audiobooks directly from the device with your wireless headphones. At the time of writing this review, all of the top five New York Times bestseller titles were available on both platforms at the same prices, with the only discrepancies being one that was on sale as a Kindle ebook and one that was available to read for free for Kindle Unlimited and Kobo Plus subscribers. Both of those monthly subscriptions give you unlimited reading access to thousands of titles, but I would give the advantage to Amazon on this one since Kindle Unlimited has been around for much longer. Amazon also has Prime Reading and Kids+ subscriptions that work with Kindle devices and provide even more content to paying subscribers.

As far as borrowing ebooks from your local library goes, it might be a draw. Kobo integrates elegantly with Overdrive, making it nearly seamless to get borrowed books on your ereader. Simply connect your Overdrive account and library card in the settings menu and you can then either browse your library’s offerings directly on device, or use the Libby mobile app to borrow titles and those will appear automatically on your Kobo. My only gripe with this system is that it works best if you have just one library card, since you can only connect one at a time. I’m a unique case where I have at least three library cards and I switch among them in Libby depending on which has the title I’m looking for.

Those like me might prefer the “send to Kindle” option in Libby, which just takes a couple more clicks to get any book from any library network to your Kindle device. The biggest downside here is that my Colorsoft review unit did not show all of my library book covers in full-color glory on the lock screen. After troubleshooting with a representative from Amazon, it was determined to be a title-specific issue. According to Amazon: “For library books, the lock screen is taken from the designated marketing cover for the book used by the library, which may not be the same as the actual book cover.” So just know that if you get most of your reading material from your local library, there’s a chance some of the covers may not display properly on the Colorsoft.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the $250 Boox Go Color 7, which earned a spot in our best ereaders guide after my colleague Amy Skorheim tested it. First, it’s imperative to know that Boox devices require a bit more tech-savvy than a Kindle or a Kobo, as well as a willingness to experiment. They are full-blown Android tablets after all, and that might be exactly what you’re looking for if you get your reading material from many different sources, since it offers access to the Google Play Store and all of its apps. As for specs, the Go Color 7 has a seven-inch Kaleido 3 display with 300 ppi in black and white and 150 ppi in color (similar to the Colorsoft), along with a warm light, page-turn buttons, a splash-resistant design and 64GB of storage (and a microSD card slot for more space!). It’s even more similar to the Kobo Libra Colour in feature set and price, so it’s another option for anyone willing to think a bit outside the standard ereader box.

The decision between Kindle, Kobo and Boox is infinitely more complicated than choosing between the Colorsoft or the standard Kindle Paperwhite — and that’s precisely because of the stark price difference. The Colorsoft is $120 more than the regular Kindle Paperwhite ($100 more if you pay to remove the lock screen ads from the Paperwhite, and $80 more than the Signature Edition) and aside from the color panel, it only adds wireless charging, the auto-adjusting front light sensor and doubles the storage. Remove color from the equation, and arguably the most useful of all of those is the extra storage but, make no mistake, 16GB of space on the Kindle Paperwhite is nothing to scoff at and will be just fine for most people. Unless you’re 100-percent certain that color will make a huge difference in your day-to-day reading experience, the standard Paperwhite is the better value.

Wrap-up

While it’s very late to the color E Ink party, the Kindle Colorsoft is a solid premium ereader that provides an excellent experience both in color and black and white. I focused a lot on comparisons in this review because most people will not have the opportunity to have the Colorsoft and any of its contemporaries side by side (unless you’re my dad, who buys almost every ereader and small tablet under the sun). But to be clear, the Colorsoft is a good Kindle, and in many ways, Amazon did pull an Apple here. If you’re already heavily entrenched in the Kindle ecosystem and have been holding out for a color ereader, this is the device to get — just be prepared to pay a premium for it.

Also, like Apple and its various operating systems, there’s something to be said about the convenience and ubiquity of the Kindle ecosystem. The library is seemingly endless (with discounts galore), supplemented by Prime Reading and Kindle Unlimited, so it’s easy to get sucked in when you’re already shopping on Amazon for household goods and holiday gifts. But when it comes to value for your money (and a pure spec breakdown), you can get more from Kobo and Boox devices. Kindle isn’t the only name in town anymore for ereaders, and it hasn’t been for a long time, and that seems to be a more pronounced fact now with the introduction of the Colorsoft. If nothing else, Amazon has finally filled a glaring hole in its ereader lineup with this device.

Amazon Kindle Colorsoft vs. the competition

Nintendo reported that sales for the first half of 2024 fell 34.1% to 523.2 billion yen ($3.43 billion) as it saw a slowdown in sales for Nintendo Switch hardware and games.

And in the mobile and movie-related intellectual property business, sales decreased by 43.3% year-on-year to 31.2 billion yen ($204.8 million), mainly due to the decrease in income from visual content related to The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Meanwhile, R&D expenses went up 15% in the half year — perhaps a sign that the company’s next-generation game console is coming soon. (It’s expected in 2025). Foreign currency expenses were also higher. Overall, net profit was 108.6 billion yen ($713 million, down 59.9%).

As a result of the weaker quarterly results, Nintendo downgraded its forecast from 1,350 billion yen in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2025 to 1,280 billion yen, down 5.2%. It also expects net profit to be flat.

Instead of selling 13.5 million Nintendo Switch units, Nintendo now expects to sell 12.5 million, down 7.4%, in the fiscal year. And it expects to sell 160 million units of software, down 3% from the earlier expected 165 million units.

So far in the half year, Nintendo has sold 4.72 million Switch devices (down 31% from a year ago) and 70.28 million software copies (down 27.6% from a year ago).

Nine titles have sold more than a million units in the first half, including 2.58 million for The Legends of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, 2.31 million for Mario Kart 8, and 1.94 million for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.

Digital sales for the first half of the fiscal year decreased by 26.5% year-on-year to 159.9 billion yen, but as a proportion of total software sales for the dedicated video game platform, digital sales increased 6.1 percentage points to 56.3%.

Digital sales declined year-on-year mainly due to a decrease in sales of downloadable versions of package software and add-on content for Nintendo Switch.

Apple will be introducing a new feature to its Find My app that allows you to temporarily share the location of a lost AirTag with “an airline or a trusted person,” according to MacRumors, which is testing the second developer beta release of iOS 18.2. The feature could make it easier for airport staff to locate a missing piece of luggage if Find My indicates it’s nearby.

In iOS 18.2 the Find My app now has a “Share Item Location” option that creates a link that can be sent to anyone, not just your trusted contacts. On Apple devices, the link will open the Find My app, allowing someone else to see the location of the AirTagged item. On non-Apple devices, the link will instead open a web page with a map showing the item’s last known location.

The link automatically expires after a week, or when your missing item has been returned to you. You can also see how many people have visited the link you created, while an additional “Show Contact Info” option lets you share your phone number and email address so that the person who finds your missing item can contact you.

Apple introduced the option to continually share the location of an AirTag with up to five additional people in September 2023, so that an entire family can keep tabs on the locations of pets, vehicles, or other shared items. This latest feature expands that functionality, letting you temporarily enlist more people to help you find something, without requiring you to remember to later revoke their access to the AirTag’s location.

The film industry is renowned for vividly depicting an imagined near future. Think humanoid robots (I, Robot), memory erasure (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) or even life extension (Vanilla Sky). Inevitably, some portrayals and predictions are wide of the mark; others, however, give viewers a glimpse of what technology is to come.

While we still haven’t unlocked the full potential of fully automated cars or jetpack transportation, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the novel, Minority Report, managed to correctly anticipate some aspects of the future – such as personalized digital ads, iris recognition software and kinetic virtual interfaces. Subtly, though, the film’s most central theme has become its most prescient: technology capable of predetermination.

India  will set up 50 solar parks across the country with a total capacity of around  37GW and have identified  30GW  worth potential offshore wind energy sites as a part of the Modi government’s mission of achieving a 500 GW renewable energy target by 2030.

The news was announced by India’s New and Renewable Energy minister Prahlad Joshi at the  International Solar Energy (ISA) assembly going on in Delhi. The international event is attended by delegates from 96 out of the 120 members, with 29 nations sending their energy ministers. 

Joshi incidentally was elected president of the ISA for the next two years, along with co-president France. ISA is a global agency that works with governments to improve energy access and energy security worldwide and promote solar power as a sustainable transition to a carbon-neutral future. ISA’s mission is to unlock  US$1 trillion of investments in solar by 2030 alongside achieving 1,000 GW of installed capacity in renewable energy. This, even while reducing the cost of the technology and its financing. 

It promotes the use of solar energy in the agriculture, health, transport, and power generation sectors. ISA was launched mainly due to the initiatives of France and India, who are incidentally, the present co-presidents.

For India, the motive of the international organisation aligns well with its own domestic efforts, with renewable energy, especially solar, achieving tremendous growth. India is estimated to be inching close to the 100 GW mark in solar power generation alone. 

“Our journey in renewables is one of vision and progress,” Joshi said at the inaugural session of the ISA Assembly. This year’s union budget increased the funding for solar projects by more than 100%, with new schemes like the PM  Surya Char Muft Bijli Yojana and tax exemptions on import of critical minerals used in the new energy lifecycle. 

ISA, despite being a new international body, has already achieved global acclaim for its projects like the  Solar Data  Portal, a platform that delivers real-time data on solar resources, project performance, and investment opportunities across countries, as well as the  Global Solar Facility aims to unlock commercial capital for solar projects in  underserved regions, especially Africa. 

In addition, ISA’s SolarX Startup Challenge has successfully identified and supported innovative, scalable solutions for the solar sector in Asia, Africa and the Pacific region, with the next edition of the challenge scheduled to be held soon aimed at Latin America.

The rise of AI continues to work its way into more industries and the latest on Microsoft’s front is an AI chatbot for Xbox that you can now test. The AI chatbot was initially discovered earlier this year and it now looks like the company is beginning to roll it out to users. Though it’s only a specific group of users for now.

The company hasn’t said when it will roll the feature out fully but it is reportedly testing the waters to prepare for future AI features coming to Xbox consoles. As reported by The Verge, Microsoft plans to integrate AI features with Xbox down the road. And the new AI chatbot appears to be part of Microsoft’s larger plan for AI integration with the Xbox platform.

Xbox Insiders can now test the AI Chatbot for support services

Officially called the ‘Support Virtual Agent,’ the new AI chatbot is available for Xbox Insiders beginning today. You’ll need to be an Insider to access the new AI support assistant, and if you fall into that category you can get to the tool from Microsoft’s Xbox Support page. Microsoft says Support Virtual Agent can answer questions about Xbox console and game support issues.

For example, if you don’t know how to redeem an Xbox gift card, the Support Virtual Agent will be able to tell you how to do that. You could also presumably ask it anything else pertaining to an issue you’re having with the Xbox platform. Say a game isn’t working and you need help fixing that, or you need assistance with a purchase.

After you sign into the support page with the same account you used for the Xbox Insider Program, you’ll get a pop-up about using the Support Virtual Agent after clicking the “ask a question” button, Microsoft says. From there simply type in the box what you want to ask and the tool will hand you AI-generated responses to best assist you with the issue you’re having.

Support Virtual Agent has two customization options

Microsoft doesn’t really make it clear if it will keep the customization feature, but for the testing period with Insiders during the preview, there are two customization options for the virtual agent. One is an Xbox orb featuring green and blue hues. The other is an animated robot head. It appears as if you can swap between these whenever you want. So at least during the preview, you can seemingly flip back and forth as you see fit.