Hasta La Gadget!

At this point, you probably know a lot about the new Kindle. But it’s this little hardware addition on the underside of the device that’s caught our attention:

What’s that in the middle? Why, yes — it’s a microphone!

According to the new Kindle User’s Guide, “the microphone is not currently enabled but is provided for future use.“ Some folks think it’s for voice navigation, which could give Kindle a major accessibility advantage over its competitors. (E-readers and tablets still remain way behind PCs on this front.) David Rothman thinks Amazon/AT&T might stick a phone in there, which seems pretty unlikely given how intent Bezos and Amazon seem on refining the reading experience rather than competing with Apple and general-purpose tablets on all things multimedia.

But voice annotations and memos don’t seem too far-fetched; and if the apps developed using the Kindle Development Kit get off the ground sometime soon, I suppose the more hardware goodies third-parties have to play with, the better.

Andrys Basten identified the microphone in a short roundup at TeleRead, “Unheralded new features in the Kindle 3,” focusing on subtle but sharp software tweaks. For instance, the web browser now has an “article view” mode, similar to the new Reader function in Safari or the popular iOS app Instapaper.

Likewise, PDF reading has been improved: the viewer now lets you highlight and copy-and-paste text, and adjust the contrast for better readability (a major problem in the past for scanned/photocopied docs). There are even workarounds for avoiding document delivery charges over 3G, by either syncing with your computer or sending your documents to an email address that waits until you’re in wi-fi to send them along. Saving bandwidth is saving money, especially if you’re not using it to buy something from Amazon.

All this points to Amazon trying to strengthen and reposition the Kindle as a general text document reader, not just a portal for e-books. And it makes it pretty unlikely that Amazon/Sprint would just drop a whole new data stream in there, even if they could try to introduce a new monthly fee — something that could make Kindle users, having been promised free 3G for the life of their devices, to totally lose it.

Photo credit: Amazon.com