Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire
Very impressive announcements from Amazon today. I’m actually most interested in the new $79 Kindle. It’s the perfect size and weight for reading, and a good compromise of features. I have a Wi-Fi Kindle 3 and have never wanted 3G and only rarely used the keyboard. I actually prefer the hardware page-changing buttons to touch. They feel natural and don’t lead to fingerprints on the screen.
Update (2011-09-29): Lukas Mathis explains more about why page-turning buttons are good.
Update (2011-10-04): Stephen M. Hackett reviews the $79 Kindle.
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@Chucky I got the Kindle 3 with Special Offers, kind of as an experiment to see whether the ads would bother me, and it turns out that they don’t. (Whereas, on iOS it really feels like they’re in the way, and I always pay to remove them.)
I love being able to go to the Kindle Web site and save a Web archive with my highlights and notes. Plus, it’s more comfortable to hold than a dead tree book.
I don't want a Fire, but I do find the Silk announcement to be the most interesting one of the day. They're being quite explicit about the way they're trying to leverage AWS in a way I never saw coming.
@Chucky Silk is intriguing, but I have pretty much zero interest in getting a Fire (though I think it’s a great product). E Ink is better for reading, and iOS is better for apps. I suppose the content subscription would be interesting if I wanted to watch video on a small screen.
"I’m actually most interested in the new $79 Kindle. It’s the perfect size and weight for reading, and a good compromise of features."
My thoughts precisely. It's the exact hardware I've been waiting for to go Kindle.
(Though I'm thinking it's easily worth the thirty bucks to turn off the ads. Unless you're going to rely exclusively on library books, you're going to buy enough content that the thirty bucks is a pretty small percentage of your Kindle ecosystem budgeting. So, I'm actually interested in the new $109 Kindle.)
Now I have to decide if I really do want to go Kindle. While the hardware is finally just what I'm looking for, I'm pretty damn happy with the dead tree form factor. At home, I definitely prefer dead tree, and when I travel, one book is generally all I need to carry, with two or three reserved for longer trips with more luggage.
Perhaps I should just buy the new $109 Kindle and try using it exclusively for library books for a while...
(What I really want is a free e-book copy when I buy a dead tree edition, which is sorta what UltraViolet is trying to do with Blu-Ray, but I'm guessing the particular contours of the book market mean that nothing like that will ever be offered by anyone.)