Amazon has found their gadget groove. No longer the online bookseller who first cobbled together an akward E-reader four years ago, they have unveiled three new sleek Kindle devices today that have the polish of experience to them. A new touchscreen version of the Kindle manages to come in at $99 US while a "Special Offer" version of the older Kindle that includes ads will sell for $79. The bigger story is Amazon's first tablet, called the Kindle Fire with a 7" screen. It will sell for $199 US, but that's likely because it will leverage Amazon's online MP3, App, and movies stores. As of the time of this writing, no word has come as to when a Canadian release might be avaialble for these devices. Currently Amazon's product pages list them as "US Only".

The Kindle Touch

In place of physical controls, users simply tap the screen of this new Kindle on either side to turn pages forward and back or tap the middle to access a menu. A new feature called "X-ray" will offer a deeper search, pulling up in-depth information about the page you're reading using online sources including Wikipedia. There will be two versions of the Kindle Touch, a Whispersync model for $99US and a 3G model for $149

Special Offers Kindle

A non-touch version model that includes special deals and ads that users will have to put up with in order to get a lower price - $79 US.

Kindle Fire

A 7" tablet with a dual-core processor and weighing 14.6 ounces, this Android-powered device uses a heavily-customized version of Google's software and is presented as a companion for Amazon's online music, app, and movie stores in the US. It will include a free month of Amazon Prime, their online streaming content service. It's biggest trick is the ability to leverage a cloud-based storage service called Amazon Silk that will pre-render web content to make it display faster on the Fire. It's biggest competivie edge will be price, at just $199 US.

The Fire will also use the Whispersync connection favoured by past Kindles to wirelessly sync with your home computer, but also for streaming video content too. It will also include access to Amazon Cloud, their onlien storage service for backing up all your paid content from their digital stores.  

The Kindle Fire is set to ship in the US on Nov. 15th while the new Kindles will ship Nov. 21st in the US. No word on Canadian release dates.