Amazon is hiring…and it looks like the über-Kindle might be coming! The NY Times Bits Blog are either combing Amazon’s job listings or looking to jump from the Grey Lady before all newspapers are swallowed by the iPad. In either case, they spotted a few interesting listings [Note: Listings may not be entirely accurate. For the true job listings, click here.]

One engineer with LCD experience. Do we mean color LCD experience? You won’t find out until you get here. If we make it clear in the listing, then everyone will know. We’re already under pressure from a certain fruit company, and half the tech world thinks our flagship product is DOA, and the other half is expecting us to come out swinging. We like to keep the mystery alive. Must be comfortable working for a vaguely sinister division called “Lab126″.

One engineer with experience in WiFi, 3G connections, and other wireless protocols. Possibly telepathy. Must be comfortable with experimental features like “beaming” books directly into readers brains. We’re 80% sure that won’t be challenged by the publishers as a threat to audiobooks, but must be prepared to make arbitrary changes at their request if necessary.

In all seriousness, I’ve said for a while that a color Kindle is a likely next step. It fits with the SDK they’ve released, the TouchCo acquisition, and of course the looming threat of the iPad. The only disappointment I have in this is that if they’re first hiring for many of these positions, we won’t be seeing a Kindle Color for quite a while.

As far as the Bits Blog suggestion that Amazon should go Android, well, I disagree. The Kindle is already based on Linux, and the major features are already developed. Why go through the trouble of locking down Android (to block some of the wireless features, to avoid competing book programs, etc), when they can just add to the existing software what they need.

Via Bits Blog