Kindle Touch 3G Review

Amazon's Kindle family finally includes an eReader with a touchscreen. No, we're not talking about the Fire, but the Kindle Touch 3G, which uses infrared sensors to enable finger input on a crisp E Ink display. New features such as the Kindle Owners' Lending Library for Amazon Prime members and X-Ray are also intriguing additions. But, at $149, is this version worth the splurge?

Consumer Reviews

For my review, I'm going to focus it on the differences between the previous Kindle Keyboard, Wi-Fi, 6" E Ink Display - includes Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers (which I'll refer to as the K3), and the Kindle Touch (KT)

USE - As far as the reading experience, I really like the touch compared to the physical buttons on the previous generation. At first I was worried that I would constantly be turning the page from accidentally touching the screen, but this didn't become much of an issue. The screen is broken up into mapped sections, so if you touch the far left side that covers about 1" of the left of the screen, it goes to the previous page. If you touch anywhere on the other 80% of the screen beside that, it goes forward. Touch the top 1" margin, and it will bring up the menu. There is also a physical button on the bottom of the touch that serves as the Home button and will take you straight to the Home menu. The area where I found the touch most useful is the dictionary. Previously, if I wanted to look up the definition of a word, I had to use the clunky joystick to navigate through the text. If a word was at the very bottom at the end of the sentence, sometimes I'd usually just ignore it rather than go through the trouble of pressing that joystick 15 times. With the Touch, I can simply touch the word and hold it down for about 1.5 seconds (so it knows I'm not trying to turn the page) to access the dictionary, which is incredibly useful and time-saving. Underlining phrases and highlighting works almost the same way. You hold down the first word in the sentence, then after two-three seconds it will recognize what you are doing, and then you drag your finger across the rest. I never used to do this before but now I do it all the time. The Kindle Fire actually handles the dictionary search much better. Though this is probably one of the only things the Fire does better than the Touch as far as ebooks. When you swipe your finger across the page or drag it down to change, the page changes just like it did with the Kindle Keyboard, in that it draws the next page. So there is a very short flash. It does not seamlessly and fluidly switch like it does with an iPad or what you would expect if you scrolled your mouse down a web site. This doesn't detract from it at all for me. There is a new X-Ray feature that you can click on to bring up more ideas and common features of the book, but it is apparently only available on select titles and none of my books had it so I couldn't try it out. Read more...

Pros: Crisp E Ink screen; Free books through Amazon Prime membership; Multiple book-lending features; Social networking sharing

Cons: Relatively expensive; Interface requires learning curve; No physical page-turn buttons

The Verdict: The Kindle Touch 3G gives eReader fans a great E Ink screen, an innovative X-Ray feature, and more ways to get free books.

Specifications

Touchscreen                   6-inches E Ink Pearl/800 x 600

Internal Memory             4GB

Wi-Fi                             802.11 b/g/n

Headphone Jack             3.5mm

eBook Formats              AZW; MOBI (Unprotected); PDF; PRC (natively)

Document Formats         DOC; DOCX; HTML; TXT

Audio Formats               Audible (AA, AAX); MP3

Image Formats               BMP; GIF; JPEG; PNG

Rated Battery Life          8 weeks (wireless off)

Size                               6.8 x 4.7 x 0.4 inches

Weight                           7.8 ounces

Warranty/Support          One-year limited warranty