Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos told shareholders this week that color-screen Kindles are still "some ways out." But E Ink, the provider of e-paper display technology for the Kindle readers on the market today, is giving a glimpse of what that future might look like at the Society for Information Display Symposium in Seattle this week. Pictured here is a research prototype color e-reader that E Ink featured at the exhibition.

That research version is still about two years away, according to E Ink, but the company is planning to release a version of color screen later this year, and is also working on a flexible plastic display (video below). Will these be part of future Kindles? E Ink staff wouldn't say.

Interestingly, two Google employees, one of them a hardware engineer, were engaged in detailed discussions at the E Ink booth today, taking measurements of some of the displays and asking about the touchscreen features. They declined to discuss their interest in the technology.

E Ink product director Lawrence Schwartz walked through some of the new E Ink technologies coming to market (sorry for the intermittent glare from the lights above):

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