February 8, 2010,
Job Postings Hint at Amazon’s Plans for the Kindle
By Nick Bilton in the New York Times

It looks as if color screens and Wi-Fi might be the next additions to Amazon’s Kindle.

Right - Photo by Emmanuel Dunand/Getty Images shows Jeff Bezos holding a Kindle DX.

Last week, Brad Stone and I reported that Amazon had acquired the New York based multitouch screen company Touchco to integrate into Lab126, the Kindle hardware division.

This move sends one clear message: Amazon is not going to back down from a fight with Apple and its iPad. But it does leave open a plethora of new questions, one in particular: Will the next Kindle be solely an e-reader or a full-fledged computer?

Robert Brunner, founder of the design company Ammunition, worked with Barnes & Noble to create the Nook e-reader and says he believes that the Kindle will actually become two Kindles. “I think they are going to have to split their line. They can’t abandon E Ink screens, but they will need to create a color device too,” said Mr. Brunner. “Where it gets interesting is, do they just do a device that’s a color Kindle or is it a full computer?”

One thing is certain, the company is looking at color for its device. You can take a look at the over 50 job listings on Amazon’s Lab126 career board and see a range of new positions that suggest more about the next Kindle.

One job opening in particular, for a Hardware Display Manager, tells the applicant that “you will know the LCD business and key players in the market.” The key point here is the word “LCD,” which means the Kindle is possibly exploring color (unless they are hiring an LCD manager to simply gain an understanding of the color-display market).

Other job openings include Wi-Fi specialists (the current Kindle has only a 3G wireless connection), and openings for someone to “lead the software development teams that develop and maintain the applications.” The applications division could signal a move to create more apps for the Kindle, or someone who will manage the latest app store developments after Amazon announced a new software development kit was released last month to independent programmers.

But if this is true, and if the next generation of the Kindle will be full color, full multitouch, with Wi-Fi and apps, then what about the operating system?

There the crystal ball is murkier. Brian Jepson, a senior editor at O’Reilly Media who programs extensively for Google’s Android, makes the point that building a operating system to handle multitouch and color on an LCD Kindle might not be the best use of resources and time. “It’s a question of necessary versus new,” Mr. Jepson said. Amazon could go through the difficult job of baking touch into their current OS, he said. “But is it necessary to do all that when you could just grab the Android OS and use that instead?”
More at NYT.