[tomsem]

I think this is Amazon's attempt to impose some cross platform consistency while inventing a marketing term for it, more than anything else. Kindle, Fire, and Android are pretty much the same now in terms of how it works.

I think this is more or less correct (I'm comparing with PW1):

If you long tap and drag to select a short phrase, it works same as before: you have to explicitly tap Highlight to highlight and the adjustment handles appear. It displays Wikipedia, Translate, Dictionary panels.

What has changed is behavior for longer highlights: now highlight is created without having to tap Highlight (that button is now Undo). But in both cases you have to tap somewhere to complete the action (and dismiss options). Not really 'faster' IMO.

On iOS the longer selection creates the highlighting with one gesture, and you have to tap the resultant highlight to change color, delete, share, add note etc. So if all you typically want to do is create a highlight, that is indeed 'faster' (one gesture and not two). For everything else (sharing, translation, modify highlight, add note) there's another tap to execute versus the behavior on Kindle, Fire, and Android.