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Amazon revamps E Ink Kindle line

$99 Kindle Touch, $79 Kindle touchless

Updated It's official: the Amazon Kindle Fire will debut at $199 (£130), sport a 7in colour screen and run a customised version of Android with its own UI.

It'll be accompanied by a touch-sensitive Kindle, the Touch, and cheaper alternative with no touchscreen. Both have E Ink displays.

The Fire - codenamed 'Otter', by the way - lacks 3G, but it does have Wi-Fi. There's no camera, but there is a dual-core CPU. The LCD uses IPS technology as per the Apple iPad 2 and other, pricier tablets. It has 8GB of storage, but Amazon expects users to treat the Cloud as their archive.

It weighs 414g.

Amazon Kindle Fire e-book tablet

Fire will come bundled with a month's free access to Amazon Prime, the retailer's premium service. You'll have to keep forking out $79 a year if you want to stay a member.

Prime membership is all about priority shipping, but they'll now get 20th Century Fox content streamed to their Fire for free, with content from other studios to come. Non-members will have to pay to view. Apps will come from Amazon's Android Appstore.

Amazon Kindle Touch e-book reader

Kindle Touch 3G

The Touch lacks the Kindle 3's keypad, and it's smaller and lighter than its predecessor too. It will feature a tweaked UI, including a context-sensitive 'extra info' system called X-Ray that doesn't just call up a dictionary definition but encyclopaedia information too. The touch panel is based on infra-red sensing.

The 4GB Touch will cost $99 (£63). A 3G-enabled version will cost more: $149 (£95). It has a 6in E Ink Pearl screen. Both will ship on 21 November, in the US if not elsewhere. UK pricing hasn't been released yet.

Amazon Kindle e-book reader

The Kindle touchless

Don't want touch? Then a new Kindle - again, minus the keyboard, but with a five-way navpad - is available now for $79 (£50). It has 2GB of storage and a 6in E Ink Pearl screen.

You can add $40 to those prices if you don't want ads to run in place of the screensaver. The Fire doesn't - yet - come in such a "Special Offers" edition.

The Fire will ship on 15 November. The touch-less Kindle will ship in the UK on 12 October for £89, Amazon said. ®

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