The first few weeks after Amazon released the Kindle Colorsoft, a bunch of negative reviews were posted on Amazon’s website, with a lot of 1-star reviews because of the frontlight issue and a general lack of quality control.
The overall rating for the Kindle Colorsoft was way lower than any other Kindle that’s ever been released. and it still is, but things are slowly improving. After it first got released the Colorsoft’s overall rating was stuck in the 2.6-star range, and then it was at 2.8 for a while, but in recent weeks it’s crept up to 3.0, and now it sits at 3.1-stars. That still isn’t anywhere close to the Kindle Paperwhite’s 4.5-star rating, but things are slowly getting better.
Over at Best Buy the overall rating for the Colorsoft is even higher at 3.9-stars, but that’s only with 44 reviews total.
It would be interesting to know what the reviews would have been like if there wasn’t a frontlight problem. Most color E Ink devices fail to crack a 4-star rating (except Kobos for some reason) because some people just don’t like the look of color E Ink with the added filter layer.
It also makes you wonder who is really to blame for the frontlight issues on the Colorsoft. Was it an E Ink problem or an Amazon problem?
E Ink’s quality control has always been suspect; it’s not just Amazon’s Kindles. That’s what happens when a company monopolizes an industry. There used to be a second epaper company, but then E Ink bought them out and put them under so they wouldn’t have any competition.
To Amazon’s credit, they did admit there was a problem and they promised to fix it, but whether they have or not still remains in question, and their customer service hasn’t handled things very well.
Despite all the negative reviews, Amazon doesn’t appear to be having any problem selling the Kindle Colorsoft. It still has a 10k+ sold number at the top of the page, the same as other Kindle models.
I will wait for many the next generation of the ColorSoft.
For maybe the next generation.