If you're a Kindle fan, but don't want to bother with physical buttons, Amazon finally has an ebook reader for you. The Kindle Touch 3G ($149 direct) adds an impressive array of features to the entry-level Amazon Kindle ($79, 4.5 stars) including an easier shopping experience, the ability to take notes (thanks to the on-screen QWERTY keyboard), and a cool X-Ray feature that lets you delve deeper into your books. The recently renamed Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch ($99, 4.5 stars) retains our Editors' Choice award for touch-screen ereaders, thanks to B&N's $40 price drop, ad-free design, and recent speed improvements, but the Kindle Touch runs a close second.

Design, Screen, and Reading Books
The Kindle Touch 3G comes in four varieties: Wi-Fi only with ads ($99), Wi-Fi only without ads ($139), Wi-Fi + 3G with ads ($149; the subject of this review), and Wi-Fi + 3G without ads ($189).

When turned off, the Kindle Touch 3G looks slightly more attractive than the Nook Touch, thanks to its slimmer design and smooth, gray plastic bezel. The Kindle Touch 3G measures 6.8 by 4.7 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and weighs 7.5 ounces. Since it's slightly larger and heavier than the entry-level Kindle, Amazon offers a different leather case, albeit for the same $34.99. Both cases come with built-in LED lights for reading at night. In the box, Amazon includes a USB cable, but no AC adapter.

The 6-inch E Ink display still offers 600-by-800-pixel resolution (167 pixels per inch) with 16 shades of gray. Aside from the touch capability, fonts appear as crisp as they do on the non-touch version; they're slightly lighter on the Kindle Touch 3G, but you'd only notice it with the two devices side by side—I think I prefer the Touch, actually. You get three fonts, eight text sizes, and three choices each for line and word spacing. I'd like to see more fonts, though; both the Barnes & Noble Nook Touch and the Sony Reader Wi-Fi ($149, 3.5 stars) have larger, nicer font selections. As with the base Kindle, page turns are quick. The Kindle Touch 3G only does full page refreshes every six page turns; the rest of the time, it employs a caching scheme to fade out the letters and fade in new ones.

While reading a book on the Kindle Touch 3G, you don't need to swipe pages. Instead, you can just tap the surface of the touch screen, which I found intuitive. Most of the screen acts as a Next Page button, with the left edge acting as a Previous Page button; this lets you use the device with a single hand. If you tap the area near the top, you'll bring up the menu and toolbar. Here you can view your library, organize your ebooks, choose an ebook to read, or tap and hold a book for options. The single Home button at the bottom of the Kindle—which looks like a speaker grille in photos, but is actually a hardware button—returns you to the home screen at any point. 

User Interface, Typing, and X-Ray

Like other Kindles, the home screen just shows you a text-based list of what's on your ereader, sorted by when you last read each item. The Nook does it better, with an attractive presentation of what you're reading now, what's new on your device, and what your "Nook Friends" may suggest. Some Kindle ebooks are beginning to come with real page numbers that correspond to specific ISBN printings, but many still don't display page numbers (especially free ebooks). 

Typing on the on-screen QWERTY keyboard is surprisingly quick and easy. This is the Kindle to get if you want to take notes in the margins, or if you simply can't put up with the entry-level Kindle's quirky, cursor-based on-screen keyboard—which is much, much slower.

One interesting new feature is X-Ray; tap on the screen, and the Kindle will display passages from the book that mention ideas or concepts, along with descriptions from Wikipedia and Shelfari. Right now, it only works in roughly 1,000 books; Amazon is promising at least a few thousand for launch time. I tested X-Ray on Around the World In Eighty Days; the feature offered an interesting array of topics, although the barcode-like position guides for where each word was located in the text were tough to understand at a glance. It's also a lot of information; seemingly every other word led to a huge array of items.