Amazon loves readers. Jeff Bezos wanted to make it very clear at the company's Kindle launch today that he's still deeply invested in e-ink-powered book readers with the launch of the new Kindle Classic, the Kindle Touch and the Kindle Touch 3G. At the product launch, we weren't invited to touch the new Kindles, but I got a pretty close look at them and saw several demos.
The least expensive new Kindle costs only $79 (left), and it's slimmer, lighter and smaller than the existing Kindle, with a same-sized e-ink screen. Great! So what do you lose? The keyboard. This new Kindle is just a big e-ink panel with a cursor rocker and some hard buttons below it, as well as page turning buttons on the left side. If you need to enter text, you have to peck out letters from an alphabetical list using the cursor rocker. You will not be browsing the Web on this thing.
You'll be reading books, though. I've never liked the huge amount of space the regular Kindle uses for its keyboard, preferring the petite Barnes & Noble Nook. The new Kindle is purely about text display, which is elegant and simple.
The Kindle Touch (below) has a bit more going on. Here, even the cursor rocker is gone, replaced by a speaker grille below the screen.
X-Ray Your Books
I saw some demos of the Touch's new software features. It's a bit funny how Amazon feels a need to add extra content to books, like DVDs do for movies. "X-Ray" feels like the e-book version of the special features you find on a DVD.
Pop open the X-Ray menu using the touch interface and you get a list of characters and historical events; you can then cross-reference them throughout the text and read profiles from Amazon's Shelfari site. I can see how this would be helpful for "Game of Thrones," for instance.
Double-tap on paragraphs to highlight them for notes. You can type on a touch keyboard, with very well-spaced keys to prevent mistyping. It doesn't look like you can type quickly on it, but you won't need to.
To get the best price on both Kindles, you need to sign up for on-screen ads. The ads are fine. They're unusually elegant and good-looking, not like the stuff you usually see from Google. Don't fear the ads.
Kindles vs. The Competition
The two new Kindles go up against the Barnes & Noble Nook and the Kobo eReader Touch, and it'll be interesting to see how that battle shakes out. We liked the current Nook better than the last Kindle; it's smaller, with a more attractive interface and intuitive touch controls.
Ditching the keyboard brings the Kindle closer to the Nook's size, and Amazon says the new Kindles have more advanced e-ink technology than their competitors, with better contrast and faster page flips. Amazon also says it set up the touch targets on the Kindle Touch to be friendlier for left-handed readers than the Nook's setup is.
We'll get both e-readers in as soon as we can and see if they beat the competition.
For more, see PCMag's first look at the Kindle Fire tablet, as well as Kindle Fire vs. iPad 2 vs. Nook Color: Specs and Features Compared and PCMag's live blog of the event. Also check out the slideshow below for more images from today's press event.