The $99 Kindle Touch eReader is Amazon’s first attempt at a touchscreen eReading device. Both Barnes and Noble and Kobo eReading manufacturers released a touch enabled eReader before Amazon. Amazon’s response was to release their product at a retail price which undercut both of their top competitors. The $99 Kindle Touch eReader does come with one caveat, however. Those customers purchasing the Kindle Touch will be granted Special Offers on their home screen and screen savers which offer extended discounts to Amazon digital content and other items. Amazon says those offers will never take place inside of any digital e-book, magazine, newspaper game or application.
The new Kindle Touch is approximately 8% lighter and 11% smaller than the previous Kindle, and also delivers multitouch gesture navigation. That shrinking of the device came at no cost to the screen size, which remains 6 inches. The Kindle Touch can download e-books in 60 seconds or less, and employs free Wi-Fi access to do so. And with a couple of features that are unique to the Kindle Touch eReader, text to speech and audio book capabilities are on board, as well as support for MP3s.
Amazon recently announced a library lending program for their eReaders with over 11,000 libraries across the United States, and this new Kindle Touch eReader can hold up to 3000 e-books. At approximately 30 minutes of reading each day with Wi-Fi turned off, Amazon claims that the new Amazon Kindle Touch will deliver 60 days of usability on a single battery charge. Amazon offers over 800,000 e-books for $9.99 or less, as well as access to millions of free e-books which are out of copyright, including classics such as Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein.
Amazon also automatically backs up the Kindle Touch’s digital library in their Cloud Storage system, meaning that the Kindle Touch owner does not have to worry about losing any of their digital content. Resolution offered is 600 x 800 pixels at 167 pixels per inch, and the device measures 6.8 x 4.7 x 0.40 inches (172 mm x 120 mm x 10.1 mm) and weighs 7.5 ounces (213 grams). The Kindle Touch comes equipped with a microUSB 2.0 port and 3.5 mm audio jack, and rear mounted speakers, and a USB cable is included with each purchase to charge the unit. The Kindle Touch eReader was set to start shipping on November 19, and all pre-orders are due to ship out first. Buy the Kindle Touch for $99 or the Kindle Touch 3G for $149.
November 20, 2011 at 5:49 pm
It doesn’t have a capacitive screen.
August 24, 2012 at 8:24 pm
This may be a stupid quostien, but are you shopping at Amazon’s US site or the UK site?Also, a lot of the free books are in the public domain. these can be found in Kindle format at gutenberg.org and manybooks.net, among others. You have to download them and transfer them to the Kindle via USB, but it’s pretty easy.