Yesterday, we speculated on the new Kindle – and this morning at the press release, there’s been a lot of confirmations of the rumors we shared, and more on the actual features. Before we dive into our opinion of the new Kindle, and what it means to YOUR business, we thought we’d share the confirmed features.

The Biggie – a 9.7 inch CRISP eInk screen

Boasting a 9.7″ screen, with 16 grayscale shades (giving a slightly crisper feel over the older Kindles), the Kindle DX is around 2.5 times larger in screen size than both the 6″ Kindle and the Sony eReader. Having seen the video demos on it, it looks far closer to a newspaper, and gives a closer approximation of ‘traditional’ media. As it’s geared towards newspaper and magazine subscriptions, as well as textbooks, it also holds up on the images – crisp shading that appears to hold up when using magnification.

3500 book capacity, 3.3GB Memory

The Kindle 1 holds 200 books (according to Amazon’s website), the Kindle 2 stepped this up to 2GB (or around 1500 books). The Kindle DX, with 3.3GB of memory, is well adapted to carrying around multiple textbooks and, with its high resolution display, is also well adapted to handling newspaper and magazine subscriptions. This massive memory allowance is probably to make up for the fact that the Kindle STILL doesn’t have external memory slots. At over 3GB of memory, it doesn’t matter as much, but is still a concern for those that look for all of the bells and whistles.

New Auto-Rotation and Amazingly Thin

Taking a leaf from smart phones, there’s a solid auto rotate system now in place, which is, of course, one of the list of features people have been clamoring for. Originally expected to be part of a firmware upgrade, it’s been added to this iteration of the Kindle. Added to this, the new Kindle is the thinnest release to date – and at just over a third of an inch, it even trumps out the Sony E-reader as the thinnest on the market. Combine this with the autorotate feature and this is going to appeal to those that want to simply read (and ‘ignore’ the keyboard) and those that find it hard to hold it vertically.

New Built-In PDF Reader, 3g Wireless and more

There’s a new built-in PDF reader provided by Adobe, wireless 3G support provided by Sprint, and tons of other bells and whistles including 1xRTT only coverage fallback for areas without 3G and 25% more battery power, the 3g is a great contender to take eBooks to the next level. Whether it lives up to the ‘rescue the newspapers and magazines’ tag that lots of people are tossing around it’s (skinny) form remains to be seen, but for the moment, the DX looks like an essential piece of technology for anyone looking to grab their e-reader whether it’s to replace their first gen with one with a more advanced piece, or, if you’ve been waiting for the 1st gen products to prove their worth.