Amazon just released a new $79 Kindle available for immediate shipment. I ordered one to review and it should arrive on Friday. I’ll post a full Kindle 4 review and some videos over the weekend and next week.
In the meantime, let’s go over all the available information about the new Kindle 4 in this quick review.
First off, there are two versions, one with ads and one with out. The non-ad Kindle 4 costs $109 and the Special Offers Kindle is of course $79. The ads and coupon special offers are displayed on the screen savers and at the bottom of the homescreen, not while reading.
To get the price so low, Amazon had to sacrifice some of the features. The keyboard was axed, and so was audio support—no speakers or headphones, so no text-to-speech either. Otherwise the user interface and feature-set is pretty much exactly the same as the Kindle 3, aka Kindle Keyboard.
This $79 Kindle 4 is the basic model; there’s a new touchscreen Kindle as well, simply called the Kindle Touch, available with optional 3G wireless. Not to mention the Kindle Fire Tablet.
The Kindle 4 is the only new Kindle currently available. The Kindle Touch and Kindle Tablet will hit the streets in the second half of November.
Kindle 4 Specs ($79/$109 Kindle)
- 6″ E Ink Pearl screen
- 600 x 800 pixel resolution at 167 ppi, 16-level gray scale
- 2GB internal memory (1.25 available)
- Wi-Fi
- USB 2.0 port
- 5-way controller
- Page buttons on both sides (they are hard to see in the picture)
- Supported formats: AZW, TXT, PDF, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; HTML, DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion
- Battery Life: up to 1 month with wireless off, 3 weeks with WiFi on
- Dimensions: 6.5″ x 4.5″ x 0.34″
- Weight: 5.98 ounces
Kindle 4 Features
- 8 Font sizes
- 3 font types
- Faster page turns
- Supports Non-Latin Characters
- Image zoom
- Portrait and landscape modes
- Real page numbers (Amazon said that months ago and I’m still yet to read a book with them)
- Built-In dictionary
- Wikipedia and web search
- Free Cloud Storage for all Amazon content
- Collections
- Web browser
- Add bookmarks, notes, highlights
- View popular highlights and public notes option
- Lend ebooks (only works if publisher approved)
- Get library ebooks
- Whispersync keeps everything updated—last page read, annotations, etc
- Set default language: English (US and UK), German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese.
Subscribe to The eBook Reader Blog to keep updated on the latest Kindle reviews and news, or follow on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
no keyboard? so how do you take notes? (something like the letters/symbols on the ‘old’ Kindle keybords? ie five way controller to highlight and then enter?) looking forward to the review…
They definitely want to make it hard for people to justify spending the $150 for the Sony reader even if it is a lower price than usual from Sony.
What’s interesting is that they claim only 1 month battery life for the cheap option, instead of 2 months. I can’t see them actually bothering to use different batteries for the different devices so is it just a ploy to get people to spend the extra $20 or did someone forget to apply the new battery math that magically boosted battery life an extra month?
I’m impressed, this is the direct competitor to the Nook Simple Touch (can we not just call it the Nook 2) and the Kobo Touch that Amazon needed. This is the simple, no frills ereader that Amazon needed. I like the price and the design is “almost” as good as the Nook 2. Given how well designed and implemented the Nook 2 is, I am waiting to see how well the Kindle 4 stands up.
I find odd the difference in size for the new kindle reader.
6.5″ x 4.5″
x 0.34″
versus
6.8″ x 4.7″
x 0.40″
5.98 ounces
verus
7.5 ounces
Does the cloud storage part change? We already could archive our books purchased from Amazon.
Part I am curious with the review is the experimental browser part. The degree to which browser performance has improved and whether they have increased its functionality at all.
Yeah, it’s like they swapped archiving for the cloud storage buzz word. Looks like it is the same as it has always been to me. More marketing BS is all it is.
If I read it right elsewhere, I guess personal documents will now be available to be archived to the storage locker, which would included any books converted to mobi from EPUP.
Just got my kindle(4) this afternoon. Very nice. seems like better display. first one with special offers . thought it would bother me but it is ok. could be held with one hand and used but better with two. back has a rubbery feel which makes it comfortable and easy to hold.
Sweet! That was fast. Should get mine tomorrow…
Is this Kindle suitable for reading image PDF files(scanned) with mathematical expressions like those available at http://www.archive.org ? Please don’t ask me to convert them to
.MOBI or .AZW formats or to O.C.R them ,as they fail to reproduce the mathematical expressions correctly even with professional softwares.
No 6″ ereader is going to be very good for scanned PDFs.
Thanks Nathan,
But when I googled, i got some customer reviews stating that the Kindle $79 model is not suitable for reading image PDF files. Are you sure about it? Or do we need any sort of file conversion.
Is the screen-size the only limitation? Is the format (ie,image PDF not simple PDF) really supported for large files
65-75 MB(any loading or page turning delay)?
I hope I could get through the screen-size limitation using
some cropping tools like K2PDFOPT from http://willus.com/k2pdfopt/.
Yeah, the screen size is the main limitation. For PDFs your better off getting a tablet or a 9.7″ e ink ebook reader.
I’ve had 90mb files load fast on the new Kindles. Some ereaders can get bogged down and slow with large files though.