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Amazon Kindle Touch 3G

Amazon's Kindle Touch is a very capable touch-screen ebook reader, but when it comes to price, the Wi-Fi-only version makes the most sense. The 3G option puts it too close to the more-versatile Kindle Fire tablet.

November 14, 2011

If you're a Kindle fan, but don't want to bother with physical buttons, Amazon finally has an for you. The Kindle Touch 3G ($149 direct) adds an impressive array of features to the entry-level ($79, 4.5 stars) including an easier shopping experience, the ability to take notes (thanks to the on-screen QWERTY keyboard), and a cool X-Ray feature that lets you delve deeper into your books. The recently renamed ($99, 4.5 stars) retains our Editors' Choice award for touch-screen ereaders, thanks to B&N's $40 price drop, ad-free design, and recent speed improvements, but the Kindle Touch runs a close second.

Design, Screen, and Reading Books
The Kindle Touch 3G comes in four varieties: Wi-Fi only with ads ($99), Wi-Fi only without ads ($139), Wi-Fi + 3G with ads ($149; the subject of this review), and Wi-Fi + 3G without ads ($189).

When turned off, the Kindle Touch 3G looks slightly more attractive than the Nook Touch, thanks to its slimmer design and smooth, gray plastic bezel. The Kindle Touch 3G measures 6.8 by 4.7 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and weighs 7.5 ounces. Since it's slightly larger and heavier than the entry-level Kindle, Amazon offers a different leather case, albeit for the same $34.99. Both cases come with built-in LED lights for reading at night. In the box, Amazon includes a USB cable, but no AC adapter.

The 6-inch E Ink display still offers 600-by-800-pixel resolution (167 pixels per inch) with 16 shades of gray. Aside from the touch capability, fonts appear as crisp as they do on the non-touch version; they're slightly lighter on the Kindle Touch 3G, but you'd only notice it with the two devices side by side—I think I prefer the Touch, actually. You get three fonts, eight text sizes, and three choices each for line and word spacing. I'd like to see more fonts, though; both the Barnes & Noble Nook Touch and the ($149, 3.5 stars) have larger, nicer font selections. As with the base Kindle, page turns are quick. The Kindle Touch 3G only does full page refreshes every six page turns; the rest of the time, it employs a caching scheme to fade out the letters and fade in new ones.

While reading a book on the Kindle Touch 3G, you don't need to swipe pages. Instead, you can just tap the surface of the touch screen, which I found intuitive. Most of the screen acts as a Next Page button, with the left edge acting as a Previous Page button; this lets you use the device with a single hand. If you tap the area near the top, you'll bring up the menu and toolbar. Here you can view your library, organize your ebooks, choose an ebook to read, or tap and hold a book for options. The single Home button at the bottom of the Kindle—which looks like a speaker grille in photos, but is actually a hardware button—returns you to the home screen at any point. 

User Interface, Typing, and X-Ray
Like other Kindles, the home screen just shows you a text-based list of what's on your ereader, sorted by when you last read each item. The Nook does it better, with an attractive presentation of what you're reading now, what's new on your device, and what your "Nook Friends" may suggest. Some Kindle ebooks are beginning to come with real page numbers that correspond to specific ISBN printings, but many still don't display page numbers (especially free ebooks). 

Typing on the on-screen QWERTY keyboard is surprisingly quick and easy. This is the Kindle to get if you want to take notes in the margins, or if you simply can't put up with the entry-level Kindle's quirky, cursor-based on-screen keyboard—which is much, much slower.

One interesting new feature is X-Ray; tap on the screen, and the Kindle will display passages from the book that mention ideas or concepts, along with descriptions from Wikipedia and Shelfari. Right now, it only works in roughly 1,000 books; Amazon is promising at least a few thousand for launch time. I tested X-Ray on Around the World In Eighty Days; the feature offered an interesting array of topics, although the barcode-like position guides for where each word was located in the text were tough to understand at a glance. It's also a lot of information; seemingly every other word led to a huge array of items.

Kindle Store, Special Offers, and Other Features
Amazon's Kindle Store cross references book reviews with the print editions, you get plenty of lists, and navigating the store itself is considerably faster than it is on the Nook Simple Touch or Sony Reader WiFi. In addition to typing out words for book searches, you can just tap books for more information instead of moving the cursor around with the control pad to select an item. Amazon's cloud-based backup lets you synchronize books and reading across multiple Kindles, as well as iPhones, iPads, Android phones, PCs, and Macs with the Kindle app installed.

The new $79 Kindle, the $99 version of the Kindle Touch, and the $149 version of the Kindle Touch 3G, which I tested for this review, come with Special Offers. These are mostly either full-screen ads for various products and services, or small banners across the bottom of the home screen. Some are genuine special offers that include discounts, but others are just flat-out ads. It's a bit weird to find a different ad each time you pick up the Kindle to read again. Ad-free versions cost $40 extra; this difference alone could tip buyers in the direction of the Nook Simple Touch.

The Kindle Touch offers other benefits over the base model in addition to the touch screen. There's a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack, which lets you listen to audiobooks, podcasts, and music files. The text-to-speech feature is back (it's missing from the non-touch Kindle). There's 4GB of internal memory, with about 3GB available for user content. That's good for nearly 3,000 books (as compared with 1,400 for the entry-level model). There's no memory card slot or ePub support, although you can sideload TXT and PDF files with the bundled USB cable. Amazon is rolling out its public library-based lending program, but it's still on a library-by-library basis; there's no easy way to find out which libraries support the Kindle.

Amazon says the Kindle Touch 3G should be good for roughly two months of battery life on a single charge, assuming half an hour of reading per day. Charging the Kindle Touch 3G takes roughly four hours using a free USB port on a PC or a generic power adapter; Amazon still sells an optional AC adapter as well.

Conclusions
You now have several good choices for ebook readers at bargain prices. Essentially, it depends on how much of the experience you want on the device itself. If you just want to read, don't care about audiobooks, and you're willing to shop for and organize your collection on a PC or Mac, the entry-level Kindle gets you there for less money.

Deciding between the Kindle Touch 3G and Nook Touch is tougher. We're leaving the Editors' Choice with the Nook Touch, largely because you can get an ad-free experience with a touch screen for just $99. B&N's ecosystem lacks ads across the board; in a world increasingly saturated with them, that's an important distinction. Amazon, on the other hand, is defaulting to quoting prices and comparisons for models "With Special Offers;" keep that in mind while shopping. Of the versions without ads, only the Wi-Fi model (at $139) makes sense; spring for the $189 ad-free 3G model, and you're just $10 away from the vastly more versatile tablet.

The ($99 for Wi-Fi, $139 with 3G, 4 stars), the model Amazon released in 2010, is still available. This version includes a hardware QWERTY keyboard beneath the screen, so it's a little larger and heavier than the Kindle Touch as a result. Finally, the $150 ad-free Sony Reader Wi-Fi is another good option. It's arguably the slickest from a gadget perspective, with its attractive styling and beautiful font presentation, but the Reader Store isn't as flexible, and Sony's device support ecosystem isn't as large.

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