Amazon's newest Kindles get sharper screens and finally add accessories fans have asked for, but the signature six-inch size isn't going anywhere.
Amazon unveiled a redesigned Kindle lineup this week, finally adding long-requested accessories like a Bluetooth page-turn remote and a charging dock. The core hardware, though, keeps the screen sizes Amazon has sold for years. At a briefing at the company's New York headquarters, Kindle vice president Kevin Keith said the 140-gram entry-level Kindle already slips into a pocket or bag, and that shrinking the screen to four or five inches would force too many design compromises. Kindle design vice president Chris Green said Amazon is "looking into" smaller formats, the same way it has previously explored foldable and rollable e-readers, but offered no timeline or commitment.
That restraint stands out against a growing wave of credit-card-sized, Chinese-made e-ink devices, like the Xteink X4 Pro and the upcoming Boox Picco, that have built a devoted following on BookTok and Reddit among readers chasing maximum portability. Amazon's choice to sit this out shows a company optimizing for its mainstream buyer rather than the enthusiast eyeing a phone-shaped reader like the Boox Palma. Keith called the tiny-reader crowd "a very vocal group of people" whose actual size he admitted he didn't know, which reads as a company hedging rather than ignoring a trend outright.
If you want an e-reader that disappears into a jacket pocket, the scrappy import brands remain your only real option, while Amazon stays content polishing the format it already owns.