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The Amazon Kindle Scribe is the biggest member of the Kindle family, with a 10.2 inch E Ink display that’s large enough to comfortably fit magazines, comics, or PDF documents. It’s also Amazon’s first Kindle device to support pen input. But early review suggest there’s little to set it apart from other similarly-sized E Ink tablets.

For its part, Amazon says that the Kindle Scribe will get better over time thanks to over-the-air software updates. And now the company is outlining some of the new features that should hit the device in the coming months.

According to a new “Coming Soon” section on the Kindle Scribe product page, we can expect:

  • New brush types
  • Copy and paste tools
  • Additional notebook organization options
  • Support for sending documents to Kindle Scribe from within Microsoft Word

While those software improvements could help make the Kindle Scribe more competitive with devices like like the reMarkable 2, Kobo Elipsa, or an Onyx BOOX Note line of products. It also has at least three other things going for it:

  • The Kindle Scribe is the first 10+ inch E Ink device I’m aware of to have a 300ppi display.
  • It features tight integration with Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem.
  • With a $340 starting price, the Kindle Scribe is the most expensive member of the Kindle lineup, it’s cheaper than most other 10+ inch E Ink tablets with pen support.

But there is at least one limitation that’s unlikely to be resolved via software updates. The Kindle Scribe’s pen isn’t pressure-sensitive. If you want to change the brush type or line thickness, you’ll need to do it with a series of taps on the screen rather than by adjusting the pressure or angle of your pen stroke.

That means that while you can probably take handwritten notes or highlight documents on the Kindle Scribe, it may not be the best option for folks who want to sketch digital artwork.

Amazon hints that the new features are just the start, and that the company will provide “regular, free software updates that include new features” in the future.

via GeekWire

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6 replies on “Amazon promises to bring new features to the Kindle Scribe”

  1. Two things of note:
    1) Why were these features not included before release? Would you buy a clothes washer that online had a basic wash cycle, with a promise to add a spin cycle later? I don’t understand the obsession with releasing half done products, or the consumer’s willingness to buy them.
    2) A Gen 9 iPad costs less then this thing new, has a comparable display size, and has a pressure and angle sensitivity pen for purchase as low as $70 on semi regular sales. Why is Apple able to make a much more powerful device and sell it for less? Economics of scale can only explaine so much.

  2. I think that is really cool. It would be neat to use it to replace my older and aging Kindle that I have (the battery went from lasting a week to barely lasting two days).

    1. I really like my Elipsa in principle. The functionality it has is pretty much all that a device like this needs.

      But its RAM management is atrocious, and it will crash and destroy your work if you push it to its RAM limits. Lost about an hour’s worth of annotations on a pdf just the other day 🙁

      Same can be said about the Advanced Notebooks. Really awesome functionality in principle. But actually use it seriously and the device will hit its RAM limits and crash and burn your work.

      It makes me sad. The device is so close to being so good, but it just… you have to always babysit it and hope that it does not flake on you.

      Does work really well as just a reader though, and you can sideload everything you want through Dropbox, so at least there’s that.

      1. I know what you mean with the advanced notebooks. Too bad they’re basically meant to be like a notepad not a notebook when it comes to the content you tend to write in them at a time. If the device were more powerful you could use that to write a novel freehand rather than typing it out =)
        It also has some issues with REALLY big PDFs and CBRs. I got some from humble bundle that are in the hundreds of MBs with high def pics (one of their graphic novel bundles) and I can’t open any of them on the Elipsa, it just freezes up. To bad given that some of it is manga or b&w and would look great on the Elipsa. I might try to downsize it on calibre and try again some day though

        My annotations on on PDFs on the Elipsa are for translation work (mistakes in the original, things to research in either the original language or target language or things to ruminate about how to best phrase it or adapt it etc. so nothing too heavy, mostly highlighting, circling, underlining and the occasional idea

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