[Update] Amazon Kindle Event Wrap-up.

Amazon just unveiled some new Kindles. Bookworms rejoice! Now there’s a Kindle for everyone at $79, $99, $149, and $199 price points. Hop past the break for the rundown…

Kindle

Looking for a great e-reader and not necessarily wanting/needing a ton of extra bells and whistles? This re-designed, smaller Kindle is for you. According to Amazon, this Kindle is under 6oz and 18% smaller than the Kindle 3. But the real reason you’d want to shack up with the Kindle: It’s $79 price tag. The new shrunken Kindle can be ordered and shipped starting today.

Kindle Touch & Kindle Touch 3G


Image Credit: Slashgear
What is more intriguing (to us at least) is the new Kindle Touch. The biggest departure from previous devices is the Touch’s button-free design. How do you navigate you ask? Simple: tap on the left side of the screen to go back a page, right side to move forward, and the bottom-center to bring up the menu. And because it uses an e-ink display, battery life is lengthy.

But the real feature to remember the Kindle Touch by is the new “X-ray” functionality that allows you to select a page and instantly have a Wikipedia page pop-up with all the info you could ever want on important words or subjects on any given page. This info is reportedly downloaded with the text which explains the “instant” ability.

Another Kindle variant outed today: Kindle Touch 3G. Specs are identical to the 3G-less Kindle Touch (save for the obvious) with the data plan needed to accompany the device set at $50 “for a lifetime of data in over 100 countries”.

Thanks to the highly focused feature market, the Kindle Touch can be priced to move at $99 with a 3G version hitting the wallet a tad higher at $149. Pre-orders begin later today with shipments going out to customers on November 11th.

Kindle Fire


Bloomberg leaked this one a tad early.

In short: feature junkies looking to get a robust e-reader from Amazon will want to look no further. With a dual-core processor, 7″ IPS display, heavily customized version of Android, access to Android Market apps, and all the books/music/TV shows/movies you could ever want thanks to Amazon Prime, what’s not to love? Not a bad way to spend $200, eh? Pre-orders for the Fire start today with the device officially shipping November 15th.

**From what we’ve seen so far, the custom flavor of Android actually looks really good. Android phone manufacturers take note. This is how you do custom Android skins.

Amazon Silk

 

“A thread of silk is an invisble yet an incredibly strong connection.”

Besides the new hardware, Amazon revealed a new browser/technology/service that will power device like the Kindle Fire moving forward called “Silk”. The concept is simple: render cloud-based content on the cloud. For anyone who’s remotely familiar with the concept of server-side browsers/rendering already know the heaviest lifting gets down many miles away by some beastly server, with the pre-rendered, smaller web page being sent to your mobile device. Popular browsers such as Opera Mobile and SkyFire are two more prominent names that have used such technology in years past.

In Amazon’s implementation with Silk, they call the technology “Dynamic Split Browsing” as the browser will intelligently toss data back and forth between local and remote rendering depending on size, signal quality, etc.

Wrap-up

A lot of good Kindle news today. Any e-reader fanatics going to jump on the new generation of Kindle e-readers?

At the $199 price point we actually think Apple may have some serious competition for more casual tablet users. Even though the ~$200 jump to an iPad brings some added functionality, the Kindle Fire offers up enough for most mainstream users we think. Thoughts?

Update

SAI is reporting that the pricing listed above is for ad-packed devices that feature “special offer” ads. If you’d like to score any of the new Kindles without ads you’re looking at $110/$140/$190 for the Kindle, Kindle Touch, and Kindle Touch 3G respectively. Deal breaker?

Image Credit (main post image): MSNBC

Via: Engadget | Slashgear | MSNBC