Clues to new Kindle capabilities at end of year

StrategyEye has been looking at Amazon's Lab126 job ads and reports that Amazon may be planning to improve the Kindle web browser, as they posted an ad for an engineer to design new features on an "innovative embedded web browser."

The article reports fears that Kindle customers who are newspaper subscribers could just go to a newspaper website for free (specifically mentioning the NY Times) and then cancel their newspaper subscriptions.  It's not clear to me that StrategyEye knows that Amazon Users can already web to the NY Times online.

We can already read the NY Times online in its full-text format, which I have a link to in the downloadable file of mobile-device-optimized websites described and available at http://bit.ly/mobiweb.

We can also go to the regular website but that would be masochistic as that is very slow.  The text-optimized NY Times though is fully available.

Wireless use drains e-readers quite a bit, but a full-throttle web-browser would drain it very quickly.

StrategyEye reports that some believe the planned improvements are "part of a damage control exercise in prepararation for next month's release of the iPad."

  But in no way would a new version be ready by that time anyway, unless one is thinking about e-readers that are rushed to market and unreliable.
  There ARE obviously plans for a touchscreen to be ready by the end of the year and almost surely some kind of color screen with it, from all that I read (rumors are heavy about both Touchco which Amazon now owns and Mirasol, the latter dropping hints but also trying to entice all e-reader makers with their impressive technology although the colors are somewhat muted and there may be less contrast).
  EInk/PVI has stated that they could also have color ready by the end of the year also.
  So, I think any web browser improvements would be slated for a new Kindle near the end of the year.

  In the meantime it would be very good if they could improve the current model's web browsing so that it's faster and handles 'https' links. But, as StrategyEye worries, a faster browser will eat up more bandwidth, especially when people use a much faster browser much more and then 24/7 web browsing would likely be put on tiered pricing.

  StrategyEye writes that "A better browser would open up the internet to Kindle users and could put serious strain on the AT&T network."  The Kindle is already open to the Internet and is the only e-reader that gives (free) cellular wireless for this -- the other e-readers confine customers' web access to their own stores.

  And there they note the possibility that "Kindle customers could potentially cancel their subscriptions to publications such as the New York Times and access the paper's website for free."
  Certainly, with the iPad, the publishers should worry about that even more, as they could access the regular web pages of the NY Times as opposed to accessing, more practically and slowly, the mobile-unit optimized text pages of the NYT.

I've always been patient with the slow Kindle browser because it's free and I need that kind of access outside only for quick lookups.  I imagine that any decent speed capabilities will bring tiered-browsing plans, so I'm not over-excited about this.

Amazon buys Touchco - UPDATE2

Amazon has acquired Touchco, a New York-based start-up specializing in touch-screen technology.  We all know what that means.  This, coupled with the Mirasol stories about something happening with Qualcomm's color display and Amazon's Kindle (with hints from Qualcomm reps), indicate we may see an additional, quite different Kindle by September-October or so, at which time the non-touchscreen models will likely go down in price.

The NY Times story by Nicky Bilton and Brad Stone reports that the staff of 6 for that start-up will merge with Lab126, Amazon's Kindle hardware division, which has recently had ads for 40+ new technical employees)

Like the Mirasol technology, this one will be somewhat less expensive (relative to similar items of their types) for makers also.  The report says that

' Touchco uses a technology called interpolating force-sensitive resistance, which it puts into displays that can be completely transparent and could cost as little as $10 a square foot. The capacitive touch screens used in the iPad and iPhone are considerably more expensive. Unlike those screens, the Touchco screens can also detect an unlimited number of simultaneous touch points.

Touchco’s technology uses resistors that are sensitive to different levels of pressure. It has said its screens can distinguish between the touch of a finger and the pressure of a pen or similar pointing device. The company had designed its technology to work well with full-color LCD screens, similar to those used in the iPad and Hewlett-Packard’s coming line of tablet PCs. The technology could allow Amazon to introduce a full-color touch-screen Kindle, raising the question of whether the device’s current displays, which are made by a company called E Ink will play a role in the next round of reading devices. '

The caption under the photo describes a feature not mentioned in the body of the article: "Touchco’s technology is fully flexible, as pictured here, which would allow for a more robust Kindle."

UPDATE, 2:48 PM - Original posting made 2:32 PM
Eric Engleman of TechFlash reports that "Amazon nabbed Microsoft Windows executive Mike Nash for its Kindle team."  He'd worked most recently as corporate vice president in charge of Windows 7 platform strategy.

Engleman also sees that the Lab126 ads have increased to 50.

UPDATE2, 3:04 PM - Extremely brief video (a few nanoseconds)of an example of the Touchco GUI - involves moving an object, in this case, on a remote screen.
Other company videos once at youtube are no longer available there.