Tablets | News

Amazon Ships Kindle Fire, Kindle Touches Early

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 11/14/11

Amazon will release its new tablet, the Kindle Fire, one day early, and its new e-readers, the Kindle Touch and the Kindle Touch 3G, six days early.

The Fire, previously scheduled to ship November 15, is currently the bestselling item on Amazon.com, according to information released by the company, and will begin shipping today.

The new tablet features a 7-inch color touch screen, a dual-core processor, free storage in the Amazon Cloud, Whispersync for books and movies, and Amazon Silk, the company's new Web browser that is designed to accelerate "the power of the mobile device by using the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud," according to information released by the company.

The Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G, which were originally scheduled to ship November 21, will instead beginning going out November 15. The Touch 3G includes the same design and features of the Touch, but also includes 3G wireless capabilities.

Features of both e-readers include:

• A 6-inch multi-touch e-ink display;
• Text-to-speech, audiobook, and mp3 support;
• Wi-Fi capability;
• The ability to borrow Kindle books from a public library;
• X-ray, a feature that allows users to access Wikipedia or Shelfari from within a book, or see every mention from within the book of ideas, historical or fictional characters, topics, or places;
• 4 GB of internal storage, capable of holding approximately 3,000 books; and
• A battery life of approximately 30 hours with wireless turned off.

The Touch, Touch 3G, and Fire sell for $99, $149, and $199 respectively. More information is available at amazon.com.