“A hardware designer who worked on the first generation Kindle recently told me that the inspiration for the design came from early BlackBerry smartphones,” Nick Bilton reports for The New York Times. “‘Jeff Bezos would come into our design meetings and say he loved his BlackBerry and the ease with which he could find e-mails and respond to people,’ the former Amazon designer explained. ‘That’s why the first Kindle was so boxy, had the funky square keyboard and that strange scroll wheel on the side; it was all inspired by Jeff’s BlackBerry.’”

“Since then however, the Kindle has come a long way,” Bilton reports. “The latest versions of the Kindles that were announced this week all come without those bulky scroll wheels and the dozens of cluttered buttons. Now though, in many respects, they are starting to look more like iKindles, imitating the design of the Apple iPad. ‘The design of the Kindle — and other tablets — are all marching to the beat of Apple’s drum; you can’t get much more minimal than a black rectangle,’ said Justin Ouellette, a user interface designer at Tumblr. ‘I think it’s very telling that the latest Kindle uses the exact same Gorilla Glass as the iPad.’”

Read more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Since84" for the heads up.]