Amazon revamps E Ink Kindle line

UK prices

Are those prices (£130 for the Fire, £63 for the Touch) actual UK prices, or just wishful thinking based on the $ to £ exchange rate?

On a serious note, the pricing looked really good until I spotted the "UK pricing not announced" bit, so we can add at least 20% (for VAT) to those prices, probably more. Still, it makes me glad I didn't go out & buy a Kindle now just to have it be out of date; there might be some good bargains to be had on the old ones pretty soon.

No free 3G - no deal.

Being able to check BBC news and mail accounts while being on a beach pretty much anywhere in the world for free is awesome.

Even with UK TAX added, those are damed good value, cheap enough that if it breaks, you dont want to die, I predict will sell like no ones business!

Hope they sent a nice bunch of flowers to Waterloo, Canada

apparently it's built on almost identical hardware to Playbook by the same manufacturer - RIM gets the production bugs out, Amazon reaps the rewards...

Any of these use e-ink...

or are they all LCD displays?

To me.......

... not that anybody needs to care about what I think :-P... the importance isn't so much the technical quality of the touch or the Kindle3. It's the breaking of the $100 barrier. That's a headspace barrier that may (and I have no hard figures to back this up) only accelerate e-reader take-up and e-book sales.

Declaration of interest:

Yes, I write, and my next book is coming out as an e-publication. I'd tell you what it is and where, but that would be advertising :-P.

I'm quite excited too

but I wonder how long it will take them to appear in the UK. There was quite a lag with the original Kindle wasn't there?

At $199 (or whatever that turns into in £s), the Fire would be quite a good option for children. I wonder whether Amazon will do any content filtering as part of the back-end processing of web pages to exclude malicious or adult sites?

I'd quite like to see one device with both an lcd screen and e-ink screen (either side if they can't think of a more ergonomic way of doing it).

I like e-ink for reading long passages but for quickly flipping through a book or for flipping around managing collections (or accessing other material - like a website) an lcd would be nice.

Confused

So are ANY of the new range actually "Kindles" with e-ink, or are they all different LCD tablets? For those of us who want a Kindle to read on, do we pay more for something without all the fancy features or what?

Touch

I have a PRS-350 and touch works great on it. E-ink is vastly overrated though. It does make for a readable screen but the contrast is awful.

Keyboard

I'll stick with my Sony, but the keyboard on the Kindle was the reason I didn't go for one, so it's interesting to see they've finally dropped it.

A portable movie-rental device sounds interesting, though.

Ahhhhhh

What's the proper spec of the thing? It's all very well saying dual core but speed, memory, etc? Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

Kindle UK Pricing is availabe here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0051QVF7A?country=GB

And it's crap... .$79 (no sales tax) in the US should be about £60 including VAT here. But it's actually £90.

UK price

£89 for the new smaller Kindle - www.amazon.co.uk for a pre-order. That's for a wifi only version (doesn't appear to be a 3G one).

Kindle touchless wifi only is £89.00 on Amazon with a release date of 12/10/11.

So no, not £63, but lets be honest, who actually expected it to be that?

$199 is...

...probably right where it needs to be.

That's not a bad price for a content consumption device. Sure, it's not easy on the eyes like a dedicated e-reader but selling a 7-inch tablet with a bit of brand power for two hundred bucks could be a roaring success for Amazon.

I'm interested, this it the right price and right form factor for my needs.

Prices just got confirmed starting £89

Pounds for dollars.

The one you get for £89 is non-touch: you navigate an on-screen keyboard image using the 5-way controller. Pre VAT that's £74. The equivalent non-touch version is $79 in the USA. Takes me back to the good old days of Cisco pricing.

Special Offers

I think the difference comes from there not being a 'with special offers' advertising supported option. The $99 Kindle touch is $139 without it, and the one we're being offered here is $109 without.

So $109 in £ is £72.66 + 20% vat = £87.20. So all in all, fair doos really.

At least this explains the recent rash of Kindles being offered as prizes

I even managed to blag one (sadly wifi only but I'm not ungrateful) for listening to a lot of marketing speak for a few hours.

I need to try harder for the iPad however

Let the price wars commence

Looks like Apple have been going after the wrong people - Ipad mini for USD 199? They'll probably sell like hot cakes and then Amazon will have them.

and the question no-one has asked...

How does it deal with the huge pile of non-amazon supplied books I already have (most in epub format with no DRM). Is it necessary to use Calibre (I assume that will provide a host as it does for the existing Kindles) to manage a library?

I like the idea of the device. I don't like the idea of being tied to a particular vendor one little bit, and have no great interest in purchasing books, particularly if they're tied to DRM in any way. I do have an awful lot of my own books, y'know, folded paper things, which are slowly being scanned, proofread, and stored away.

I've now seen the prices: that "£50" for the most basic model has warped into £89.

VAT would have made it £60 so the other £29 is just a gouge.

Still cheap but but still overpriced compared to the US.

Won't be bothering until they price them fairly.

Exchange Rate

Didn't know Stirling was so low against the dollar! $79 in USA £89 in UK... What's that about?http://www.reghardware.com/Design/graphics/icons/comment/thumb_down_32.png