Personally I'm actually doing most of my reading on a tablet these days, even though I initially hated doing it that way (it helped once the dpi on tablets got high enough). I know a lot of people get worried about getting locked into the Kindle ecosystem with no way out, but I also know from some authors I listed to, they're finding that a ridiculously high percentage of their sales are through Amazon and not through other sources (to the point where some of them don't even bother with the other stores these days because it's not worth it to them). So I'm not sure getting locked in is necessarily quite the detriment that it was, and even then, there are tools to work around it anyways.

I did use a Kindle Keyboard model for a long time and really liked it. My wife eventually broke hers, and since I'd started using the tablet, she started using mine. And that eventually died on us on our last trip, so we ended up picking up one of the paperwhite models for her. (So that's one dead through physical damage, and one that just died, I felt we got our use out of them, not sure exactly how long we owned them though.) My biggest complaint with the current kindle models is the lack of page turn buttons unless you go with their real expensive model. But other than that, I think the current Kindle models are pretty decent.

Of course, all of them are pretty much going to be just as vulnerable to dropping and breaking.

As far as any real new features, the only thing I'd really think would be that much of a difference would be having the light source built into the device. Looks like the Kobo models all do now, which means the bottom one of those is probably relatively equivalent to the kindle paperwhite, and fairly equivalent in price it seems. If you don't need the inbuilt light, the basic kindle is probably adequate and cheaper (the screen is a lower res than the other models, but I'm guessing it might be relatively equivalent to what you had on your old kobo - I'm pretty sure the resolution is similar to what I had on the kindle keyboard, and I never had a problem with that, seems less an issue with eink than with lcd).