Amazon’s new Kindle Touch is $US99. Businessweek also reported that Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet is going to be an equally preposterous $US200. The $US99 price point is for the Special Offers version, though, so if you need a totally ad-free reader, the no-ads version will run you $US139.
The tap zones on Kindle Touch have been rearranged — there’s a small top area for the menu, a small area for previous page on the left, and next page fills most of the screen. It uses an IR touch display.
The 3G model is $US149 and will have free, unlimited wireless. The no-ads of the 3G unit is $US189.
Kindle Touch will be up for pre-order today and ships on November 21.
Update: The Kindle Touch is a beautiful piece of tablet. Thin, grip-able, and fine looking. The matte front is a great compliment to the e-ink display, and the absence of buttons is wonderfully minimal. But, most importantly, the Touch’s touch works just swell. Keyboards inputs and taps were very responsive — very impressive for an IR display, which usually pales in comparison to a capacitive screen like the iPad’s.
Aside from being able to use your fingertips, X-Ray, activated with a tap, should be the Touch’s coolest new feature. The ability to get supplementary Wikipedia info on battles, politicians, places, world events — the most important terms on every page of any book — will be enormously helpful. X-Ray’s like having endnotes for every book you’ll ever read, and it’s downloaded automatically alongside.
Update 2: Here’s a lil’ bit of video of the Kindle Touch, specifically highlighting the X-Ray feature. Very slick indeed.