Three New Kindles Announced: Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Fire

William Judd

Speaking at their press conference just minutes ago, Amazon have announced the release of their latest e-readers, the Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch and Kindle.

Kindle

The Kindle (3? Button?) is a standard, smaller Kindle without touch capabilities. It costs just $79. It features faster page turns and free Amazon cloud storage, but no full keyboard. It ships today (at least in the US). The old Kindle is now called ‘Kindle Keyboard’.

The Kindle will be available for £89.99 in the UK, from the 12th of October.

Kindle Touch

Interestingly, the Kindle Touch has also been announced, at $99. Wow, that’s cheap. It uses an IR touch system, giving touchscreen features to the e-ink display. It’s the same size as previous Kindles but with a much bigger display, making the most of the obviation of the physical keyboard. It uses three ‘tap zones’, corresponding to next page, previous page and menu. There’s even integrated Wikipedia background info called X-Ray, e.g. showing information about the Treaty of Versailles on the specific page that it’s relevant to.

The Kindle Touch 3G is $150, and both will be shipped on November 21st.

Kindle Fire

This is the first Kindle to include a color touch screen, hence the new moniker, and comes in a very similar 7″ form factor as BlackBerry’s Playbook tablet.

Perhaps most interestingly, the Kindle Fire is only $199… this is very close to the HP Touchpad pricepoint that sparked massive fire sales a few weeks ago when it was reduced due to HP’s reorganisation. The Fire also comes with a free month of Amazon Prime. All of this will likely put massive pressure on tablets to lower their prices to compete.

The Fire uses the popular Android mobile operating system, but with a custom UI that is similar (if much more fully featured) than its Kindle predecessors. As well as books, the Kindle Fire store will include streaming music and video. There’s even a newly termed ‘Kindle Single’, which is apparently a novella-length article ideal for mobile reading.

Internally, the Fire comes with standard wireless connectivity (no 3G yet). There’s a dual core processor, though, and a decent (but not massive) amount of internal storage. With most of your purchases sitting happily in the Amazon cloud (and they are world leaders in that field), internal storage isn’t that important though.

Many popular Android applications are also on board, including Fruit Ninja. There’s a Webkit-powered browser as well called Amazon Silk, which leverages the cloud to cache web pages, images and stylesheets. It looks pretty awesome, and I’ll be interested to see how it performs in the wild.

We’ll update this story as we get more details, what do you think so far?