They’ve gotta be kidding, right? $139 for a brand new Kindle with more features than ever, other than 3G wireless?
“If you don’t need the convenience of 3G wireless, we have an incredible new price point — $139 for Kindle Wi-Fi,” Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement this evening. “Kindle Wi-Fi has all the same features, same bookstore, same high-contrast electronic paper display, and it’s even a tiny bit lighter at 8.5 ounces. At this price point, many people are going to buy multiple units for the home and family.”
So, call it the Kindle for Kids, the Student Kindle, or the Family Kindle, but at $139 there are going to be millions of buyers for the new Kindle Wifi
Like the new $189 Kindle 3G, the $139 Kindle Wi-Fi is available now for pre-order and will ship on August 27.
It comes with all the new features available on the brand-new third generation Kindle 3G, except for the wireless 3G itself. Instead, this $139 model comes with wi-fi connectivity only, which may be a case of “addition by subtraction” for some of our sons and daughters who are trying to read their homework assignments or summer reading list choices with a minimum of distraction.
Here’s what you’ll find on the Kindle Wi-Fi:
Major Performance Improvements:
- the new Pearl e-ink technology providing 50 percent better contrast, unveiled with the Kindle DX Graphite, due to lighter background and darker, clearer fonts;
- the classic Kindle 6-inch display in a super-thin Kindle body that’s 21 percent smaller and, at just 8.5 ounces, 16 percent lighter;
- a 20 percent faster screen refresh or page-turn speed;
- more than double the storage space from the 1,500 books accomodated by the Kindle 2 to a 3,500-book capacity that equals that of the Kindle DX;
- The longest battery life yet for a Kindle or any other ereader, according to Amazon: one month with the Wi-Fi turned off (we are awaiting clarification from Amazon on battery life with Wi-Fi turned on.
Equally important, reading gets easier than ever for all of us, and especially for the visually impaired or anyone with vision issues, with several new accessibility features:
- Text-to-speech is now augmented with new voice-guided text-to-speech enabled menus that allow us to navigate on the Kindle without having to read menu options or content listings and item descriptions on the home screen. The new Voice Guide audible menuing feature handles all of that.
- New hand-built, custom fonts and font-hinting make words and letters more crisp, clear, and natural-looking, including a very clean new san serif font.
- Amazon is also releasing a brand new lighted Kindle cover, sold separately for $59.99, that includes an integrated retractable LED reading light that never needs batteries and hides away into the cover when not in use. It lights the entire Kindle display without glare and draws its power directly from the Kindle’s battery through the new gold-plated conductive hinges that connect the Kindle to the cover.
- For those of us who like to read quietly in bed, the new Kindle features quieter page turns. As someone who had actually shifted to a smaller font some evenings so that those little next-page clicks wouldn’t disturb my sweetheart quite so often, I have to say that I love the subtlety of this kind of improvement, which demonstrates to me the extent that Amazon really drills down on usability issues. My only concern on this one is that, in touting it, Amazon’s press release goes distinctly off-message in claiming that “quieter page turns means you can read all night without disturbing your partner.” Someone in the PR department needs to read the memo on how the Kindle lets you read yourself blissfully to sleep while certain backlit devices that will go unnamed keep you up all night.
Hardware Changes. In addition to the first-time availability of a graphite case for a 6-inch Kindle, there are a few hardware changes that should enhance usability:
- The Home and Back buttons and the 5-way controller are on the front of the Kindle now, as opposed to the right edge, which makes the right edge a bit less busy and cluttered.
- The form factor of the 5-way controller itself has been transformed from the joystick-like fixture on previous models to a clickable pad surrounded by a clickable four-sided directional border, somewhat similar to a trackpad. This should result in fewer unintentional “delete” commands from the Home screen, if nothing else.
- Both the 5-way controller and the unit’s hardware keyboard appeared to me to perform better, with clearer and more immediate tactile feedback, than the input hardware on previous Kindle models. But I only worked with the new model for about half an hour, so I have nothing quantifiable to share with you on this.
When you do connect with Wi-Fi to use the Kindle Wi-Fi’s web browser, you can expect:
- a faster, more navigation-friendly, vastly improved but still absolutely free web browser based on WebKit, the open-sourced Web browser engine that is also the basis for … wait for it … Apple’s Safari web browser; and
- a new Article Mode feature within the updated web browser that, similar to Instapaper, simplifies most web pages to text-based content reading.
The $50 price differential between this model and the $189 Kindle 3G places an elegant value-proposition accent on the Kindle 3G’s wireless connectivity. If you think that either of these Kindles is worth $139 as an ereader, that just leaves this question:
Would you pay $50 one time, with no monthly fees or AT+T contracts, for wireless connectivity that would allow you to check email, scores, stocks, weather and any text-intensive website from just about anywhere for the rest of your life.
