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As a K3 Wifi owner I would have bought the Touch sight unseen, but this time around Amazon decided (for perhaps totally legitimate reasons) not to sell them overseas at first, so now that I’ve had time to really consider the options, I’m sticking with my K3.
Most importantly for me, the Pearl e-ink screen hasn’t evolved over the last year (or Amazon is choosing similar-grade screens to keep costs down), so unlike the K2-to-K3 transition it’s not a no-brainer to upgrade. If they made a model with a premium screen, I’d so be there...
I do use the keyboard from time to time, so the keyboardless Kindle would be a bit inconvenient in my case. Text-to-speech is the same. I can’t say I’ve ever played a game or listened to an audiobook on the Kindle though, so I don’t care if they’re available or not. It took me about 3 page loads to give up on the K3’s sluggish web browser so that’s completely off my radar. The faster CPU would be nice of course. I’m using just shy of 50% of my K3’s memory with 450 books, so the 2GB memory would probably be OK for me. Nice to have extra breathing room though.
The Touch sounded nice until I realized they also removed the hardware paging buttons so you have no choice but to use the screen. Both options would have been nice. I want touch for keyboard input and selecting text and menu items, and buttons for navigation. And I totally need the “Back” button! In the winter I also use my K3 in the bath (with the handy Ziplock trick) and I’m guessing the plastic lying over the screen would be triggering spurious touches all over the place. So I don’t think the Touch is for me.
As for the Fire, my 64 GB iPad is stuffed to the gills with personally-scanned (image-based, so the files are big) PDF documents, so the Fire’s 8 GB of memory is laughable. On the other hand I remain highly jealous of the smaller form factor. Here in Japan small is good, and reading an iPad while standing for an hour on the train is torturous. I’d kill for a 7” iPad.
So all in all, it’s the K3/Keyboard for me! Now if only we k3 users could get the page turns to not flash the screen every time…boy I wish I had that!
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