I would have wished for more details - or rather, more features. When they talk about a better light, this is hopefully a more even light across the surface. For the "old" Paperwhite, the LEDs at the screen's bottom had a visible "aura" (no pun intended). The first production series were notorious for their color-shaded light (rather than being pure white). There seems to be room for improvement.
A 25% faster CPU is probably fine, however: what this device needs is a tad bit more RAM.
Otherwise, this doesn't make a great improvement. What that "better contrast" means remains to be seen.
As a Kindle hacker, I'm interested in what they did with the bootloader part. The Paperwhite is the first device since the Kindle DX(G) that cannot be put into "USB downloader" mode where you can re-flash the software. Given that even the original software is buggy and prone to get corrupted, that seems to be quite bad design - they can't easily refurbish units. Maybe today's pricing margins don't allow this anyway, though.
As for competing with the Kobo flagships, this is not an impressive new device.
A 25% faster CPU is probably fine, however: what this device needs is a tad bit more RAM.
Otherwise, this doesn't make a great improvement. What that "better contrast" means remains to be seen.
As a Kindle hacker, I'm interested in what they did with the bootloader part. The Paperwhite is the first device since the Kindle DX(G) that cannot be put into "USB downloader" mode where you can re-flash the software. Given that even the original software is buggy and prone to get corrupted, that seems to be quite bad design - they can't easily refurbish units. Maybe today's pricing margins don't allow this anyway, though.
As for competing with the Kobo flagships, this is not an impressive new device.