Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The Touch just joined out 'old' third generation Kindle (my own), the new a 4th generation Kindle and, since yesterday, the Fire - we are a 3 kids household so the more, the merrier :) We like the Touch and, more importantly, our 9th grader son is extremely happy with it because, while as good a reader as the other 2, he's more of a smart phone/tablet user person and he prefers interacting directly with the screen rather than pushing buttons. We all like the new Kindles mainly because they are smaller and lighter and because I wasn't using the keyboard much on my 3d gen anyway so the extra body required by the physical keyboard wasn't justified. I am still keeping my existing Kindle 3 because a family of 5 can use quite a few Kindles but I welcome the new keyboardless designs for the reason I stated above. KINDLE TOUCH vs. KINDLE (4th gen) vs. KINDLE KEYBOARD (3d gen) - which one to pick? It's not a 'who wins' context, really. Anyone who is a passive reader (like me) should welcome the new models because they are smaller and lighter but with the same screen size. Those who annotate a lot should probably get the 'keyboard'. I find the text equally sharp on all three models but graphics appear to be more crisp on K3. Page turns... They're fast enough for me on all. Battery life was never a concern on Kindles. With Wi-Fi off they keep going for weeks. The Touch is as battery efficient as the other models. And, speaking of 'charge', the new (keyboardless) Kindles comes without a dedicated charger. It's no big deal because you can always charge it off a computer or use just about any generic USB charger or you can buy Amazon's branded charger separately but it would have been nice if one was included. With the display size/quality practically indistinguishable, see how they compare below. Note that I do not include the Fire in my comparison. The Fire is mainly a tablet that, like most tablets, would allow you to read books, including those purchased at Amazon but it's not a dedicated reader. - KINDLE 4 TOUCH: no keyboard, speakers (text to speech, MP3 player), 2 buttons only, no dedicated charger, slightly larger than the 'plain' Kindle 4th gen. - KINDLE 4th GEN: no keyboard, no speakers, buttons, no dedicated charger, smallest and lightest of them all. - KINDLE 3th GEN: keyboard, speakers (text to speech, MP3 player), dedicated charger, largest and heaviest. Both my 4th gen Kindles came with ads. They don't bother me at all because ads never appear while reading. You only get ads when the Kindle goes to sleep (full screen) or something at the bottom when in a menu mode. TOUCH SPECIFICALLY The Touch is a reader, not a tablet so no one should expect the level of interaction you get from a tablet. There's no such thing as 'pinch zoom' for example. The touch interaction is confined to mostly page turning, bringing up menus of choices and browsing Amazon's bookstore. It's responsive enough for the above and the bottom of the screen, where the virtual keyboard appears, seems to be especially sensitive. Other Touch-specific feature is the ability to highlight any word in the text you are reading, triggering the word dictionary definition. Finally, the X-Ray features that allows you to search deep inside a book and get interesting insights on characters and so forth is a Touch-only feature but none of the books I have were X-Ray enabled so I can't comment on it at this time. I would also like to note that the browser, page numbers, the ability to borrow or lend books are NOT Touch specific features. All Kindles, at least 3d generation and beyond have them. It's also worth stating that no one should expect to use a Kindle reader as their main browser or, if they are a 'speaker' version as their MP3 player. These are nice to have features but what you get with these Kindles is a READER with some tiny bells and whistles. MY RATING Amazon's rating for 'I love it' is 5 stars and that's what this Touch gets. 15 months ago when I bought my first Kindle I was a little skeptical. I was concerned mainly about Amazon's proprietary format at the time but now I know that just about any electronic document that's not DRMed can be brought on the Kindle (there are many free format conversion apps) and read on it. I love Kindles because they allow me to carry dozens of books wherever I go without having to stuff my travel bags. And they allow me to read the books the way books are read, without the eye strain that I get when reading on a laptop or tablet screen. If my first Kindle wasn't 'love at first sight', our second and this one are.