And so it’s official – the new product line of Kindle eReaders and tablets is now announced and available for pre-order the Amazon.com website. They all ship in November, but Bezos himself recommends pre-ordering now.
10:52AM Fire ships November 15th. “We’re making many millions of these, but I still recommend you pre-order today.”
– from the engadget live-blogging post
As predicted and been talked about almost endlessly since rumors of the new Kindle were heard, Amazon.com and their entire website and supporting infrastructure is now tailored to allow mobile devices (and especially the new Kindle Fire) to take full advantage.
It’s a lot technical details to swallow at once, but rest assured that it boils down to us being able to browse the Amazon.com website on our mobile devices faster and more intuitively.
Furthermore, everything is now ‘in the cloud’. Amazon.com Prime has included movies and TV shows for a year or 2, but now it’s also about music, books, magazines, etc and all tied into the mobile experience.
Bottom line: Amazon.com wants to entertain you in every possible way, on every device you could own – and all powered by their very own technology.
Brilliant move.
There should be little doubt that while there are other eReaders on the market, the Nook and the Kindle are 2 biggest contenders. New releases and announcements from either of them have little or no effect on the rest of the contenders. True to form, I’ve been seeing tweets today that seem to indicate that even without placing the new Kindle line in consumers hands today, Barnes and Noble have lost market share.
Ace to Amazon.com. Ball is in your court now, Barnes and Noble.
And now for the specs:
Kindle Fire – $199
Android based – much like the Nook color
7-inch IPS panel (not 100% sure what this is, but from what I can tell it’s just an advanced LCD panel?)
Glass coated multi-touch screen
Dual-core CPU
Weighs 14.6 ounces
With Amazon.com’s new Amazon Silk cloud-accelerated browser, access to the whole range of services offered by Amazon.com is limitless and in vibrant color.
Kindle Touch ($99) and Touch 3G ($149)
Traditional E Ink Pearl display but now with multi-touch
6-inch screen
7.5 ounces (213 grams)
Content is not limited to books, magazines, etc but with Amazon.com’s traditional “experimental” browser, the experience will be less than stellar.
Kindle – $79
Traditional E Ink Peral display
6-inch screen
5-way controller as the interface
5.98 ounces
Experimental browser
Basically, the new Kindle (without the keyboard) is the Kindle Touch without the multi-touch enabled screen.
Personally, that sounds as if it is going to be as painful to type with as it is with the Kindle keyboard model we have now when typing in symbols.
It’s also important to note that the 3rd generation Kindle with keyboard is still available under new names: Kindle Keyboard ($99), Kindle Keyboard 3G ($139) and Kindle DX ($379).