What you need to know about the Kindle Touch 3G

Overview

The recent launch of a slew of e-book reader and tablet products from Amazon included the Kindle Touch 3G, a sleek, light, and powerful standalone reader. With a significant improvement of specs over the third generation Kindles, this one packs in two major features, a touch screen and 3G connectivity to access the Kindle store and buy books. The five-way controller has given way to a single minimalistic button, and the IR touchscreen is quick and responsive.

Kindle Touch 3G

Pricing and availability

The Kindle Touch 3G comes for $149 as a special offer which means you get ads on the home pages. The ad-free version comes for $189. Both these prices include free unlimited wireless. The Kindle Touch 3G is available from the Amazon online store at www.amazon.com.

What’s great

The best thing about the Touch 3G is the fact that it throws in free unlimited wireless. Now you do not have to bother about annual contracts or fees. The 3G connectivity means you can now use your Kindle Touch to buy, download, and synchronize books anywhere without having to go searching for a Wi-Fi hotspot. The Pearl e-ink technology ensures that you can read comfortably in bright daylight as well. The screen has no glare and looks like real paper. The new design is all about trimming things down, it is lighter and smaller than its predecessor.

With 4GB storage, it can hold over 3000 books. It has all the audio functions of the previous generation with text-to-speech, and audio book and mp3 capabilities. The access to the Kindle store and the public library program through Overdrive means you have the entire world of publishing at your fingertips. The Kindle bookstore itself advertises over 800,000 titles for $9.99 or less. Improved battery life is also touted as a major feature in the Kindle Touch 3G, with over 2 months of life as per company releases.

The Kindle Touch 3G introduces a clever little feature called X-Ray which allows you to scan through the entire book with one tap for references to an idea, character, place, etc., as well as access reference material on the same from Wikipedia and Shelfari.

What’s not so great

The free unlimited 3G connectivity is a misnomer. This is restricted only to the Kindle Store and to Wikipedia. For connecting to the rest of the worldwide web, you will have to use the Wi-Fi pipe only. Strangely, Amazon continues to offer free, unlimited and unrestricted web browsing on 3G on its earlier Kindle Keyboard model. The 4GB that the Kindle Touch 3G ships with is a lot, and when you club that with unlimited cloud backup, it sounds very much like “unlimited.” But there are catches here too. There is still no way to expand or port the memory of this reader. The unlimited cloud storage sounds good, but applies only to content from Amazon. The batteries are still not user-replaceable, which means you are in trouble if you are at the fag end of your power in a situation where you cannot charge the reader.

Things to watch out for

A lot of people might be falling for the unlimited 3G offer. That is obviously something that potential buyers should be watching out for, since it is likely that the marketing strategy will undergo some changes in the near future. Users will also want to look out for the battery life calculation. The 2 months of battery life is computed on a 30 minute per day usage of the Kindle Touch with Wi-Fi off. Most readers spend much more time per day on their e-book readers.

Verdict

The primary function of the Kindle Touch is that of an e-book reader. It fulfills this function perfectly and offers you features like quicker single-tap page turns, 16-grayscale images, and the X-Ray which are really pleasing. The touch screen and the 3G are nice advancement over the earlier versions. However, the conditional 3G on this is a poorly told joke. To call it free and unlimited and then say it applies only to one website other than the Kindle store makes little sense. Amazon continues to offer 3G web browsing without these restriction on the Kindle Keyboard. The logic behind this strategy is difficult to understand. If you are looking for a top of the line e-book reader, look no further. If you are tempted primarily by the free unlimited connectivity, you may want to think again. It might also make sense to hold on for a while as both Amazon and the competition figure out what to do next.

Other Alternatives

The Nook from Barnes and Nobles runs Android, has a color screen, an expandable Flash memory slot, and runs on user replaceable batteries. After the launch of the new Kindle Touch 3G, the Nook Color is selling at $224.

The Sony line of e-book readers are lighter than the Kindle, and let you view two side-by-side pages at a time like a real book, but they are more expensive and have less storage capacity.

The best alternative as well as the toughest competition to the Kindle Touch 3G comes from the base models of Kindle itself. The Kindle at $79, or the Kindle Keyboard at $99 come with almost all the reader features that Kindle Touch 3G offers. The Kindle Keyboard with 3G also offers unrestricted access to all parts of the internet as of now.

Word around the web

Vincent Nguyen at Slashgear says,

The touch navigation – with the majority of the display used to move forward through ebooks, and a narrow strip on the left of it to move back – works well, and page refreshes are fast (for E Ink technology, anyway). The on-screen keyboard is no worse than the underwhelming buttons were on the Kindle 3, and the UI has been cleaned up a little too.

It's slimmer, smaller and lighter than the existing Kindle, with a muted silver chassis that looks almost nothing like the Kindles of today. The entire user interface has been re-thought out, with "taps" being used in place of buttons.

Picture Gallery

Kindle Touch 3G

Kindle Touch 3G offers Free 3G wireless, no annual contracts or monthly fees