Now of course, one of the most important uh' things with an ebook reader is how much does it weigh? So let's check it out. New Fourth Generation Touch 210 G I'm very surprised it they haven't shaved much at all compared to the third generation. Kindle this is the Wi-Fi version. They've only shaved 10 g off it and if we compare that to the 3G version of the third generation Kindle, it's an extra 12 G for that.

So presumably the 3G version of the touch will be a 12 G On top of that, putting it basically on par with the third generation. I'm pretty disappointed in that actually. Uh, and if you compare it to the uh, uh, non-touch version fourth Generation: there's a quite a compelling uh weight saving there apart from the size as well. So I can see some compelling reasons Still, to get well, size and weight are the main reasons why you will get the non-touch uh version.

So that makes sense why they're actually um selling that. You know, if you're backpacking around the world or you're doing Ultra lightweight backpack and you want to go read out in the bush or something, you want to. Going to want to take this puppy instead of the Touch version to save a few grams. But let's compare that to, uh, a typical Uh paperback book.

I've got a moonshot here. Excellent read, by the way. and there you go. 260.

So the Kindle even though it's uh, you know it's it's still weighs a lot less than a typical uh, quite uh, like small, you know, medium siiz uh paperback B Let's have another excellent book here. 218 G So there you go. It still weighs less than um, you know, a typical size book which is fantastic and this can hold thousands. And if we have a look at the size comp comparison here compared to the non-touch uh, fourth generation version: We've Got The Touch one which we're reviewing here fourth generation and the third generation Kindle Here it uh, is, uh, it is actually bigger than the as you'd expect because it's got the touch screen and uh, I believe a bigger battery in there.

So it is, uh, slightly bit bigger than the uh, non-touch uh version. And of course, there's a big difference between the Third and the fourth generation version right there. That is quite quite substantial difference. And you can see that the Touch version here is a little bit thicker than the non-touch version and how thick is it? Well, it's just over just on 10 mm.

Basically, compare that with the non-touch version and we're talking uh, yeah, about 1 1/2 mm thicker, maybe two. There you go. And for reference, it is thicker than the third generation. Kindle Compared to the non-touch uh version.

it's uh, very similar. It's got the nice black beveled edge around the screen. I Really like that. Oops, it's touch or shouldn't touch it.

uh and uh, it's what they've The big thing, of course is that they've done away with with your traditional uh Kindle Ta page Turnin buttons on the side. There are no page Turnin buttons on the side because it's all touch. Now you are swipe a new gesture and new tap to turn pages. And the other major difference of course is that what looks like a, um, some sort of little speaker vent or microphone vent down the bottom is actually the home button and it works really well.

You push it and it takes you home. That's all you need. Really glad that they added that home button, which the Uh Kindle Fire tablet doesn't have that and it's annoying. You have to tap the screen to go into a menu to actually get back.

You can actually see that's got a really nice, uh, raised aspect to it. It is actually a button with the Mult multiple Um bars there sticking out. That's a really nice bit of uh, product engineering that I really like it. And on the back.

The big thing that was missing on the non-touch version of course is the audio output. and you can see that there's uh, two, uh speaker vents. They've got dual speakers here, so I guess that that's really, uh, quite neat cuz if you're holding it like that, you don't want to be. Uh, if you're blocking uh, one audio port on the bottom, then you still got the other one over there whether you're left or right handed.

And the external power pins are the same. so it should, uh, be compatible with any cases and things like that. And the only other uh difference is of course, a standard 3.5 mm uh phono headphone jack. Now they still have the raised uh power button here I preferred the slider one uh, on the third generation Kindle But uh, because if you throw this in your bag or your backpack or something, you can actually, um, accidentally hit that.

But because the uh consumption of the E in display is essentially, uh, pretty. you know, pretty darn low. Um, well, the display itself is zero. So um, unless you got the Wi-Fi turned on, accidentally turning this thing on in in your bag isn't the end of the world like it would be with a big Power hogging tablet and we'll give it the old twist test here and that feels pretty solid.

I'm really putting some Force into that and I I really like it. It feels like you know it feels really good. uh Quality Construction Good quality uh Plastics and materials and I have no doubt that uh, it'll uh, survive. um, very well in so with harsh handling and uh, long use, I'm pretty confident in that I Like it.

And of course this thing is only $99 if you get the ad supported one. uh, if you want one without ads, then you've got to pay $139 for exactly the same uh unit. And what that means is while you're reading books like this, you don't get any ads, which of course you know no one to buy it. If you got ads during the book, that' be far too annoying.

But what you get is uh, when you, uh, switch it off, let switch it off here and bang There We go. you get uh, you get ads and you can get ads down on your uh power on screen as well. So when you instead of the uh, nice, you know you still get some funky images when you turn it off occasionally. but you get these uh ads down here and that's what you're paying for.

that's their uh, counting on you actually, uh, clicking on these ads down here I'm not going to click it I'm not give them going to give them the uh benefit of that, but it will uh, if you do click it, presumably it will uh, shoot you through to their uh Amazon store or whoever. see Dove you know it's sponsored by Dove they've paid Amazon you know, huge millions of dollars I'm sure to, uh, put their bloody ads on here, but really, it's not a huge uh deal. I'm pretty happy to have this ad supported one I Don't really care about uh, the stuff down the bottom. um, you know, as long as it doesn't show up dur when I'm reading the book, that's the main thing.

and if you have a look at the main screen between the two here, they have actually uh changed it on the on the touch. this is the when you press the home button this is what you get and you get a uh search, a permanent search bar up there menu of course, the menu button cuz there's no dedicated menu button like there is on uh, the non-touch uh unit, and uh, the bar up the top is black, the font is smaller, they've wasted a bit less uh space in terms of the Uh name of the Kindle and things like that. and uh, they have actually changed the Uh WiFi the size of the Wi-Fi and the battery. the Wi-Fi is smaller I Much prefer this one over here, which uh has that incrementing uh bar graph like that I'm not a big fan of that uh little radar type uh radar type display there, but uh, as you can see, they got the clock up here which they didn't have on that one on the home screen so there's a few minor differences.

but I I think generally I prefer the Uh interface on the new Uh touch one as opposed to the Uh keyboard based one. One nice touch is when you're in the home screen like this, it actually has a back button to take you back to exactly where you were before you actually hit the home button. There it is, and if we actually have a look at the screen here between the two uh I expected possibly there to be some some reduced um, uh brightness of contrast uh, on the Uh touch Kindle because it has to have the touch overlay on there. but I think it's actually slightly oh I don't know, it depends on the light I maybe slightly better I think uh, even.

but really, there's nothing in it I shouldn't even bother calling that one. And let's check out the Uh page turning on these. In the old. in the non-touch you have to, of course press the Uh page button and in this one change, Pages you just uh, tap it.

so let's do that. Um, there's not a huge difference in the Uh page turnning between them. I I'm not really even going to bother to time that, but as you can see, they're um, very similar I am not going to the text uh, contrast I'm probably say slightly better on the Kindle oh no. I shouldn't say it.

I'm going to call them pretty darn close. um anyway, maybe slightly more washed out on this one. Oh, not much in it. Anyway, they've changed the uh, the interface down the uh bottom here.

they've got location one here with no bar graph. It just shows a percentage I Didn't really like this tiny little uh bar graph they had on the non-touch uh version. Um, so they've changed that I I Think they've changed it for the better Anyway, so you can, um, just, uh, touch the screen to change Pages or you can swipe of course like that and you can swipe that way to go backwards And one neat thing is you can actually, uh, just swipe like this to jump to the next chapter. It really is quite neat.

Acknowledgements: Prologue: The Beginning Bang I Like it. It's beautiful and it's not obvious how to call up the menu on this. You don't press uh, the button down here cuz that just takes you back home and you don't press the center or hold it down or something like that because that will, uh, um, take you to the next pace. So you've actually got to press in this upper region up here and it pops up with the menu.

I It's not obvious, um at all. but I Guess you only have to learn it once and then you know and of course you don't instantly get into the menu. It's got the menu button here. you get to the search button, you go shop in, you can go back and you can change the uh font size and you can jump to pages and you can sync to where you last.

uh, read it just like on the other one. So if you want the menu, you've got to call it up here and then you can turn your Wireless off and on. shop in the Kindle Store sync all that sort of stuff. add bookmarks and view notes and all that sort of stuff and it actually uh Works reasonably well.

It I've had no problems uh touching it. it's a there's a little little bit of a lag in the response um of the menu but uh apart from but that's that's no different to the non-touch one. there's a lag in put in that ARP and rendering the display and stuff like that cuz these are not high powered devices. They got e in displays which aren't very quick.

um but I find it actually works quite well. you can shut it down just by touching that and I haven't had a single misted press yet I don't think and I love. When you finished a book you can actually uh rate it and then you can share it via uh Twitter or Facebook book and uh, it sells other books that other people uh bought and you can recommend those. It's great.

And because this Kindle has audio capability, we've got the uh text to speech so let's give it a go. Go up to the menu up here and go into the menu turn on text to speech. Not all books have text to speech uh some. The publisher of the book can actually exist for pretty short time and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe.

But humans are a curious species, we wonder we seek answers. Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel and gazing at the immense heavens above, people have always asked a multitude of questions. how can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? how does the universe behave? And of course, you can choose a or female voice. It doesn't switch instantly By the way, you can change the uh Speech rate and you can pause and you can change the volume.

Woring about these questions, let's hit that and we can switch it off so it's not too bad at all. Um, you know you can. It's very apt that we're choosing a Steven Hawking book here to U you to test out a computer voice, but let's give the male one a go and set the speech rate slower or faster. Pretty happy with the default.

Hello. All of us worry about them some the time. Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.

Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of Discovery in our quest for knowledge. The let's do a search on the book and it pops up the keyboard. Let's take our first look at the keyboard here and as you can see it's uh, they've actually got like a big uh, inverse. They've got a black um uh background with white keys and it actually works Uh, surprisingly well.

I'm quite happy with it and uh, it might look like um, it it takes a bit of time to respond, but there's no lag in it at all. It actually keeps up with uh, my one finger typing. No problems at all. For example, if you hit the back key and you watch the uh characters up here, it, uh, it responds pretty much instantly to my individual.

There's a little bit of a buffer there, but it doesn't miss any. Keys the keyboard Works quite well. I'm pretty happy with that. and as for the Wi-fi at marginal reception, it seems to work very well indeed, as opposed to the new Kindle Fire which was absolutely atrocious.

I've got in exactly the same uh position out here, on my bench on the wooden desktop right at the um extreme end of end of my Wi-Fi range of pratic. I Don't need like a single bar up there for the Wi-Fi and uh, and it works. It actually works uh, quite well. I like it.

and if we go into uh shopping here, we can go into the Uh Kindle store. We can go into books Let's go into to say nonfiction it's you know it's it's pretty d quick I like it I'm pretty impressed with this and if you're worried about ghosting on the screen, well, I'm having a hard time finding any. really. it's uh, it's you know.

we got the black there and it popped up and I can't really see any ghosting I've caught a like a real tiny hint of it. but it's pretty darn good. And let's try an audio book. I've downloaded a sample of Co Sagan's contact I haven't tried it yet.

So here we go. Let's go in there and see what it's like and it comes up. You can adjust the volume, you can. uh, it looks like you can skip about 30 seconds ahead.

30 seconds back. Uh, probably go to the next chapter. Go back. Things like that.

Well, let's just play and uh, this is audible from Simon and Schuster audio. Let's SK ahead, gliding polar orbit about the great blue white star. When they pulled her out, his friends expressed surprise that the baby was so polite. It's not excellent, No problem.

I Like it it is, though a bit of a shame that it doesn't have an external audio uh, control. uh, somewhere around on the outside that you got to use uh, on screen. but yeah, not a huge deal. And while reading a book, you can do the uh slideing pinch thing and go up and down like that, so that's rather quite neat.

works well. There's one thing that's curiously missing though. We had the screen rotation in the uh, non-touch version, but in the Touch version I'm Bugg it if I can find it I don't think it actually allows you to rotate the screen upside down or anything like that you I think you just fixed till one portrait I could be wrong, but I haven't found it yet. Might have to read the manual and let's have a look.

what they've got in the experimental uh menu. Is the Uh web browser still in there? and yep, it is. They got a web browser, an MP3 player, and uh, text to speech as well. So let's go into the web browser and uh, see how that works Google Bang! It popped up straight away.

Even with that marginal Wi-Fi connection I Like it? can we pinch and zoom? Yeah, we can. We can indeed move around. Yep, let's go to Uh Eev Blog.com shall we blog? And it's got the Doom there? That's excellent. and go.

Oh, that's pretty quick for this marginal connection. That's as quick as my uh notebook. and once again, because it's the E in display, it's You know it's not very good at browsing and doing refreshing and stuff like that. It's not very quick, but that that's rendered that no problems at all.

Excellent. And of course it's got no flash player building so you obviously can't watch Eded YouTube videos and stuff like that. but that's not what. that's not what.

uh, these Kindles are designed for. Pinch and zoom in there. Go up. Jeez, that's that's.

pretty darn good and pretty quick for a Kindle Let's go up to menu and see what we can do here. We can uh, looks like a bookmark. this page, browser set settings, stuff like that. probably a Bare Bones yeah, clear cookies JavaScript disable images that sort of stuff.

Curious to know what this article mode here is. I'm not sure. Hey there we get intended for use on individual article pages and not homepages. You still want to turn on article mode? Click here.

Well yeah, why not? There we go and it's uh, it looks like it's just popped up some uh, some of my sidebar, um, text here. go figure and it claims to have an MP3 player. No MP3 files found? Oh, we'll have to upsolute load some later and give that a try and I've gone and done just that. I Uploaded an album.

uh, hooked it up the PC it just appears as a driver won't byother showing you. it's exactly like the other Kindles and uh, you drag uh, the MP3 files over to the audio. um, well over to the music subdirectory and let's have a look bang There It Is with our Yankovic's white and nerdy Beauty and and uh, we can select our track there. Well, let's do white and nerdy happy with that.

Works well. Beautiful and let's try and switch it off. Yep, no problem. Switch it off still goes and you do get a decent increase in the volume when you put it down too.

This just adds a bit of Base there off the off the bench and it comes with a document which tells you what uh, new features are in this new Kindle Smoother page turning, easy reach, exclusive new uh touch that lets you easily uh, read with one hand um x-ray this sounds interesting a reference Tool Uh. Single tap. X-ray scans your entire book for characters, historical figures, and interesting terms and provides detailed descriptions. Fantastic.

Well. I've g into the Kindle's best seller list and uh, let's download a um Steve's Jobs new exclusive autobiography. We'll try a sample of that and see if it's got the um, uh x-ray uh capability cuz none of the books I seem to have on here um, have this x-ray capability. Wow! I Just pressed stop on the camera and that's already downloaded.

That is very, very quick. I'm so impressed with the speed of this thing, even with marginal reception. There we go: the exclusive biography. Let's see if it's got this x-ray capability it's supposed to be when you call up the menu um, it's supposed to have something down the bottom which tells you it's got um, xray, but there's nothing there.

So can we read a book single-handedly right or leftand and navigate? Navigate, uh, back and forth. Well, as you know, we just, uh, click anywhere in the center there to go to the next page. but if we on the left hand side, if we click back here, we go back a page. Now if we do that on the uh, right hand side here, if we click here, we actually go forward.

so you can't click on the edge and go back. but you can swipe it like that. No problems. Excellent.

So yeah, you can actually hold this thing in one hand and use it. I Actually prefer it to the Uh Kindle's side buttons like this: I The Touch: just I I Don't know I just much prefer it. It's a it's just a better capability I think and it's more versatile of course. So what about the dictionary capability that was so easy on the previous? Kindle Well, I think we just touch a word.

Let's try Wedlock. hold it down and bang There It Is the New Oxford American Dictionary You can change your Uh type of dictionary you got in there and you can go into show full definition if you're that Keen and bang there. It is nice. It works well, and the Highlight function.

Let's give that a try. If we want to highlight this paragraph here or this sentence or something like that, we can just let's say we want to highlight that sent sentence there and bang, highlight, add note, or we can share it. We can actually uh, tweet that presumably with our social link to the passage will be included with your message and you can share it with the Uh social media that you've set up. Fantastic! I'm going to actually tweet this to my uh, several thousand Twitter followers just as a test.

I've Got to I've got to see that it actually works. Share message shared I presume I believe I've already linked my Uh Twitter in there I'll go check my Twitter account and see if it's uh popped up and it sure has it works. Test quote from my Kindle Touch There it is and it's already hashtag Kindle and it's uh, linked to uh Amazon presumably to the book. Now a highlight note by David L Jones We seem to be at a critical point: Yada yada yada test quote from my Kindle Touch There you go and it tells me the book and uh, you can read and it automatically links to the it shows the page and automatically links to the free chapter I Love It works brilliantly and once the battery's depleted, you can't miss it.

Check out the big battery symbol with the uh bar graph and it's uh, charging now. but uh, unfortunately, when you uh, hook it up it uh, if you hook it up to a PC to actually charge it, it doesn't let you uh, actually connect to the PC and charge it from completely dead like that. Looks like you've got to actually wait until it get some decent charge in it before it will actually connect to the computer. Don't really like that.

And one of the big questions with the ebook readers everyone wants to know is uh, can they read PDFs Is it any good? because the keyboard based ones are just hopeless because you don't have the ability to just, uh, drag around you know, use a sort of a touchcreen interface and and uh, and expand and stuff like that. And because it's only a 6 in, you can't read um full page PDFs which might typically be uh A4 formatted even. A5 formatted ones have a have a little bit of trouble uh, fitting on these sixin screen. So I just uh, copied over um hooked it up.

The PC copied over a couple of uh PDFs here, uh to I made a separate subdirectory called data sheets and it just uh popped up straight on my home screen here. So let's give it a go. I haven't tried it yet. Let's go in and read this one.

This is about an 850 page bang. There We go hey, I recognize that dude and uh, let's try and okay because the okay, the font. Let's try and read that. Okay, you can, you can read it, but you know that's not something you really want to be reading on an ebook so you want to expand it.

Let's try that. Yep. Bo There we go it. uh, expanded.

a bit too much there. All right, that's not bad. The images show up nicely. takes a little bit to refresh it, but uh, you can scroll around no problems at all.

It's a bit slow of course cuz these things aren't optimized for this sort of stuff. And uh, let's try the page turn. No, if you zoomed in, it looks like the page turn doesn't work. The page term will only work if you're like that and it automatically resets so the zoom has just reset itself, so expand that out a bit.

Oh, that's a little little bit too much. It's a little bit tricky there to sort of get the hang of that. Let's see if we can touch the side here like this. And no, we can't go to the next page just by touching the side.

That's a bit of an oversight. Not too happy with that. but you can, actually, uh, read these things? No problem. It's much, much better than the Uh than the keyboard based.

Kindles And here's a data sheet. Let's go in there and look at some tables. Yeah, it's It's a bit touchy, but certainly readable. so you can use these things as ebook readers.

Let's go up and have a look at the menu tap to search. Okay, can we actually search? Let's search for 10 milliamps there? I Just saw that on the screen and go. Will it actually find it? Yep, it found it There it is Bang! So you can search PDFs Awesome! There it is. Let's just see if we can zoom in on a graph.

say we want that one there Bang No problem. So the 6in screen still isn't uh, you know, ideal for viewing PDFs And the response time and stuff is a bit slow. Uh, you know you're better off with like a proper um, 9in tablet or something like that or even a 9in uh ebook? uh reader? but it's you know I wouldn't uh I wouldn't complain if uh, you know I I Didn't have to search them all day, just had to search them occasionally and you can keep your data sheets in there. It's great, works pretty well I think and with PDFs like this I think the ability or lack of ability to be able to rotate it like that and actually, uh, view a page with like that is, you know, a pretty big oversight I think so you know Ah jeez.

I wish it had that rotation capability. wish had auto rotation. that would be great for viewing PDFs Like this. and if you want to delete a document off your Kindle just hold down there like that and it pops up and you can delete.

You can view notes and marks, you can search it, or you can add to various collections which I won't going into. but let's delete it and uh, you bet we want to delete it and Bingo! We've just freed up some space on our Kindle and one of the great things about the screen on this is that it really effectively leaves little or no, uh, finger smudge marks so you really shouldn't have to clean it I mean I I can I'm really struggling to find You know I can just see a couple of um, smudge marks in there and you know if you compare it to say the Kindle Fire which is, you know, 2 seconds after using the thing, it's just the screen is just covered in finger smudge marks. You don't get that on the Kindle Touch It's great. So the verdict? Well in short: I think it's the best Kindle yet and I love it.

It's my preferred Kindle I I prefer it over the keyboard one I know some people don't. they still prefer the keyboard based one and I can see a couple of reasons why. You know if you accidentally touch the screen, you know if you handle it and stuff like that then it might be a little bit annoying. but I I just prefer the user interface the touch screen I Think it works really well.

Viewing PDFs has been fixed. You can finally do that. It's great. real Annoying Thing Lack of rotation capability I Love reading books like this.

but if I'm viewing in documents I might prefer it like that I Don't understand why they've limited it like that. It's just a software limitation they had done the previous one. Why they've killed it I Got no idea. Lack of volume control.

This is a great audio. Kindle It works quite well. Very basic of course, but they've done away with the dedicated audio controls that they had on the third generation. Kindle Once again, you know bit of cost cutting why they done it.

just annoying. so and I preferred the slide switch um on the third generation Kindle but those three things are probably the only thing can find wrong with it. It's got a not lot of nice new touches I Really like So I reckon it's probably my pick for the ebook readers. it's certainly.

I You can't beat a Kindle It does the job and it does it well. Battery life is on par with the third generation. Kindle I haven't actually uh, done performance measurements to check that? uh, that takes time. Haven't done it yet, but by all indications, it's just as good as the other one.

the ads I Don't mind it, you want to save some cash. get the ad base one. It doesn't pop up when you're reading books, which is the main thing now. I've been reading this at night for uh, last three or four nights and every night it pops up and it says first thing I do turn it on and it says your battery is flat.

please charge it. Annoying. but I know it's a Kindle doesn't choose hardly anything when you're actually viewing cuz the screen itself draws no power and it's great. So it not only survived that first night, but the second.

oh yeah, I charge it in the morning? Yeah right. Never got around to it. Second night, same eror and message pops up and it still lets me read and View and you know occasionally pops up. Your batter is completely flat, well still works and that's what I love about these Kindles They're fantastic.

They just keep on working. It doesn't just suddenly die on you and you're left in the Lurch and you can't read your damn book so he's are fantastic I Highly recommend him. One other thing that's missing of course is it' be awesome if it had an external micro SD card doesn't cost them any you. it cost them hardly anything to put that in and it' be brilliant.

It would be the biggest you know, so if it had those things if it had auto rotation. if it had the uh SD card, if it had the external volume controls and uh, you know it would be probably the best eBook reader on the market I Think it still is, but it would be by a country mile. so don't walk, run, get yourself a Kindle if you don't have one. I Love them.