Last week Amazon announced a range of new Kindle eReaders. The new E Ink Pearl display eReaders come with touch capabilities and without and are priced competitively, giving readers such as NOOK Simple Touch and Sony Reader Touch tough competition. In less than a week from announcement, the new Kindle readers have made it to Amazon’s top seller list in Electronics, even before the official release on November 21.
With so many choices, you’d want to know whether to go for a Kindle Touch, NOOK Touch or Sony Reader Touch this season. We’ll help you decide.
What’s the same?
All three eReaders come with 6inch E Ink Pearl touchscreen displays, weigh from 7.4-7.6 ounces, are almost the same in dimension with Sony Reader Touch being the thinnest (0.38″) followed by Kindle Touch (0.40″) and NOOK Touch (0.47″), and include a touchscreen keyboard.
What’s different?
Kindle Touch is available in WiFi only and WiFi+3G models. Kindle and NOOK offer 2 months battery life and Sony Reader Touch just 2 weeks. NOOK and Sony include 2GB internal storage and microSD support up to 32GB. Kindle Touch includes 4GB memory and offers unlimited cloud storage. Kindle’s touchscreen reorients on rotating, the other’s don’t. NOOK and Kindle have reading apps for iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Android, and PCs. Sony only supports Android.
What about media support?
Kindle Touch offers access to 950,000+ eBooks, 1.8 million public domain books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs; supports AZW, TXT, PDF, Audible (Audible Enhanced (AA, AAX)), MP3, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively, HTML, DOC, DOCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion formats; supports book sharing and library lending; and integration with Facebook and Twitter.
NOOK Simple Touch offers access to over 2 million books from NOOK Book Store; supports EPUB, PDF, JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP formats; supports book sharing and library lending; and Nook Friends reading recommendations and activity feed.
Sony Reader Touch offers over 2 million titles from Sony Reader Store; supports EPUB, PDF, BBeB, TXT, RTF, JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, MP3, AAC, Microsoft Word; supports library lending but not book sharing; and does not integrate with social media.
Finally, price and availability. All Kindle touch models will be available from November 21. The ad sponsored Kindle Touch, Wi-Fi, 6″ E Ink Display
There you have it. For the price and capabilities, Kindle Touch seems a great deal, for WiFi and 3G both. And if you don’t mind the special ads and screensavers, you can save another $40.
What’s it going to be then?
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
The price of Sony Reader Touch is $149, not $230.
Now is even cheaper: 129 dollars
I recently bought a Nook Simple Touch. I think it provides a great reading experience. Good constrast and weight. Don’t forget it comes with Android, leaving space for those who are tempted to add another Android applications.
I recently bought a Nook Simple Touch. I think it provides a great reading experience. Good constrast and weight. Don’t forget it comes with Android, leaving space for those who are tempted to add another Android applications. My choice has been always the nook! Go EPUB!
Never liked Amazon anyway.
Don’t forget the Kobo Touch, which is a pretty good and comparable device!
NOOK beats Kindle hands down. SONY, unfortunately, is just not in it to win it. I’d rather have an open format device with my NOOK than be tied down to Amazon’s content with Kindle.
EPUB is the industry standard that Kobo, Sony Reader & Nook all support. Whilst I love the look, features & price of the Kindle I won’t purchase one until they support the industry standard EPUB format. So many more books would be available if they supported this format, this is a serious problem for Kindle & I don’t understand why they won’t address it.
KINDLE NEEDS TO SUPPORT EPUB BEFORE I EVEN CONSIDER THEM AS AN OPTION!
they have addressed it: 1.8 million public domain books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs.
The Nook comes with Android and, after rooting, multiple applications can be loaded.
There is therefore no limit on what the Nook can do. It is also able to read even the Kindle DRM format by using their Android application.
Do you want to be locked to a single bookstore? Or do you want to be able to read ANYTHING in this world?
Your choice.
I am grateful to each of you for your input. I recently purchased one of the original Nooks and it wasn’t a touch screen. Since I have my Lightyear Andriod – I am spoiled and like the touch screen – so I sold it after 3 days on EBAY to some lucky person – it had lots of extras too!
The NOOK Simple Touch™ sounds like a clear winner based on everything you have shared so far. I am THIS close to pushing the button to order the NOOK Simple Touch™ – Thanks again!
I don’t have an e-reader yet, but was really drawn by the xRay feature on the kindle touch. I really like being able to look stuff up or jump to it, quickly. Of course, it’s not out yet, so I can’t try it out. I think that’s going to settle it for me, so I’ll go to Staples after Thanksgiving and pick either the Nook Touch or Kindle Touch based on how great that feature is.
Amazon doesn’t make money on selling the kindle touch, they make it on the ebooks they sell through their stores. If they allow epub they won’t make any money, der. Apparently they make a loss on the actual ereader so I doubt they will change that anytime soon.
I would like to buy a Nook Simple Touch, but you can’t buy them outside the USA. So people outside the USA start reading on the kindle and forget about the Nook.