Kindle Touch for sale on amazon.(it|fr|es|de)

[pirl8]

Till now it was not possible to buy a Kindle Touch on the italian, french, german, spanish and british Amazon sites.

Now the KT is available at 129€/109£ (will start shipping on april 27th). There will be also the KT-3G version (189€/169£). I guess they will be sold with a fully localized interface, with localized text-to-speech and so on. This means also a firmware with new features.

Any clue of what will happen for the those bought it in the USA? Will it be possible to update the firmware? I would find very strange having two different firmware versions (US/EU) for the same hardware.

[geekmaster]

When you start a kindle touch the first time, it asks what language you want to use. I do not think it matters where you bought it. If you erase /dev/mmcblk0p3 it will ask for your language selection again. I think the factory_reset script will do that too...

[pirl8]

Originally Posted by geekmaster

When you start a kindle touch the first time, it asks what language you want to use

Well AFAIK the K4 does ask for the language, but not the KT (K5). I bought three of them in different times (one for me, one for my brother and one more for a friend) from ebay.uk. They were all in english. I'm somewhat sure about this since you have to change the locale file to have the time in 24h format (and I made a factory_reset, too).

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by pirl8

Well AFAIK the K4 does ask for the language, but not the three KT (K5) I bought (one for me, one for my brother and one more for a friend). They were all in english. I'm somewhat sure about this since you have to change the locale file to have the time in 24h format.

I have both K4 and touch, purchased at about the same time... perhaps I confused them in my memory. I will have to try resetting my touch sometime to check that. Sorry...

But if you do get a localized one, you should be able to copy mmcblk0p1 (the main boot partition firmware) onto a US touch (check out the "select boot" and "simple debricking" threads for details).

It seems to have taken amazon a relatively long time to get localized versions of the touch ready for distribution.

[pirl8]

Originally Posted by geekmaster

But if you do get a localized one, you should be able to copy mmcblk0p1(

Ok. I'm afraid I won't buy one more kindle but I hope that someone will, and that he/she will post his/her boot partition here. I also hope that Amazon will make this option possible.

In any case I think this is interesting news, isn't it? At least the localization problem should be solved.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by pirl8

BTW, do you think that the international firmware will be available for the US version, also?

That would not be my decision to make. Perhaps amazon will release a later firmware update that consolidates all the languages into one set of firmware, but they may have more languages they want to add first. Or, they may prefer not consuming storage space in the kindle mmc and just continue distributing different firmware for different countries. I do not know what information they will use to make that decision, but it will probably take into account technical, marketing and legal issues, and could even involve royalty payments for languages not being used on all kindles if they go with a multi-language device (depending on how they pay their translators).

[pirl8]

Oh, I forgot to mention that they will start shipping between 30 days (on april 27th).

And one more thing: it looks that there will not be an ADS version: 129€ for KT and 189€ for KT-3G (with the 3G version working as in the US - which is indeed astonishing for a country like Italy where mobile phone companies are LEGALIZED THIEVES).

[bhaak]

IIRC my KT didn't ask for a language to choose. Actually I can't find anything in the settings to change the language, so it sounds about right.

When the Kindle Touch was first released, it USA-only, so it isn't surprising that it was by default set to English. But they already had all the facilities in place for it being localised, just look at the Localization thread in here.

[NiLuJe]

I'm (finally!) getting one, so I'll keep you updated on the state of the FW when I get mine .

[diba]

KT shipped to Germany will have firmware 5.1 which is multilingual. All KT can be updated with this firmware. Landscape will be part of it as well.

[JustAMan]

Any official prooflinks?

[diba]

German manual, which can be downloaded already for landscape and several answers from german Amazon hotline.
Additionally a german author I know writing about ereaders with good connections to Amazon. He will get a first one with 5.1 this week.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by diba

German manual, which can be downloaded already for landscape and several answers from german Amazon hotline.
Additionally a german author I know writing about ereaders with good connections to Amazon. He will get a first one with 5.1 this week.

Can somebody please post or PM a link to a backup copy of the 5.1 main kernel and main partition images, so we can compare them to 5.0.4? The diags kernel and partitions would be nice too, but are not important at this time. You can make a backup copy of the main and diags kernels with the "getkernels" tool here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=174674

Thanks.

[pirl8]

Italian kindle touch page on Amazon.it.

The same on Amazon UK.

It does not say if screen rotation can be automatic (via the grav sensor). Besides screen rotation, there will be support for Non-Latin Character set and interface will be available localized for english, german, french, spanish, italian, portugues (brazilian).

BTW there are two very important new features I didn't notice before:

• Content Formats Supported: Kindle (AZW), Kindle Format 8 (AZW3), ...
• Wi-Fi Connectivity: supports public and private Wi-Fi networks or hotspots that use the 802.11b, 802.11g, or 802.11n standard with support for WEP, WPA and WPA2 security using password authentication or or Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS); Supports WPA and WPA2 secured networks using 802.1X authentication methods using password authentication; does not support connecting to ad-hoc (or peer-to-peer) Wi-Fi networks.

YUMM!!!!!!

I can see also some missing language-related enhancements, however. For example the italian page does not speak about:

• X-Ray
• Text-to-speech

The spanish page is more explicit about Text-To-Speech: "Activar Texto a voz: se habilita la funcionalidad para leer el eBook en voz alta. Ten en cuenta que, por el momento, Texto a voz es una funcionalidad experimental, por lo que sólo lee en inglés americano, y no se encuentra disponible en otros idiomas."

In short: "beeing this is an experimental feature, it is available for american english only".

Since diba/ixtab/others have already found how to install TTS in other languages, I guess that localized TTS support will be just a matter of time (or maybe the problem is that language files are huge and they have to find a convenient way to perform an upgrade without the risk of trashing something).

[NiLuJe]

Nice catch!

Same thing on the french page, no mention of TTS or X-Ray, but KF8 support, landscape/portrait orientation settings, and instant bing translate on highlight...