Amazon has released a major update for the Kindle touch.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200790650
Probably the last one since they’ve already discontinued the Touch. 
A 18 month old product discarded and kicked to the curb. Makes me feel like a real fool for buying it.
Oh well. Get your update while you can. 
Feel like a fool? Why? The Touch wasn’t expensive and does exactly what it needs to do. I’ll be sad when I can’t replace it, kinda like my Nano. In the meantime it’s a great product.
A 18 month window is pretty short for a product. Even by modern tech standards thats really short.
I’d like to think what I buy has value longer than that. At least I can still enjoy my obsolete ereader until it wears out. I find myself reading more since I got a Kindle.
I like the Touch’s screen a lot better than paper white. Paper white has a glare that bothers my eyes if I read for awhile.
They’ve discontinued that particular model, but so what? That happens all the time with all sorts of products.
Just finished my update. Took quite awhile.
Theres quite a few changes in the interface.
My Kindle Keyboard 3G is starting to show some bum pixels, so I called up Amazon support to see if they had any advice (not expecting any help, since it’s 3+ years old and long out of warranty). As expected, they had no suggestions…but they are offering Kindle Touches at a discount to existing Kindle owners in situations like mine. I guess they must be wanting to get rid of their stock. I’d frankly rather pay more to get a Paperwhite or another Keyboard 3G.
As for discontinued models, I really wish I’d bought a Kindle DX while they were still on the market, as it would have come in handy for PDFs and the like. Used ones are going for exorbitant prices on Amazon and Ebay.
How many different Kindles are there?
Awhile back I ordered a standup case for my Kindle 7" and it didn’t fit. Turns out it fits the 7" HD. I thought mine was HD but I guess it’s not. It was a gift so I wasn’t familiar with the specs.
A great product that Amazon updates with most of the features of the brand new Paperwhite. How dare Amazon treat people so callously? :rolleyes:
See Amazon.com for a list of currently available Kindle models, or Wikipedia for a complete list of all devices, past and present.
I’ve come to dread and despise the word obsolete. Every couple years whatever you bought is branded with the word obsolete. I’m growing very tired of it.
Anyway, the Kindle Touch is a great Ereader. I preordered it for mom just before Thanksgiving 2011. It hadn’t come out yet and we didn’t want to buy the old model. Amazon released and started shipping the Touch a couple weeks after we preordered it. I bought one for myself right after Christmas 2011.
Some of these software update changes are just weird. They changed the Menu button to a checkerboard icon? They added a option to display book covers instead of text titles. That won’t work for us because we have too many books on the Ereader. A few other things. It’s all in that “Updated Your Kindle” book they delivered after the update.
Same thing just happened to me. I am hoping that it’sd because I am currently in a humid climate
but I’m afraid that isn’t the cause.
So here’s a question if anyone can help: What happens to the thirty-some unread books, many of which I purchased, which are on it?
Early obsolescence is vile. Think of all the stuff that goes into the landfill.
If you bought the books from Amazon, you still have access to them. If you get a new Kindle of some sort, you can download and read the books on your new Kindle (assuming you register it to the same account). If you don’t want to go that route, you can read them with the free Kindle app on your PC, tablet, or smartphone.
No matter where you got them from, if they don’t have DRM (and, of the ones Amazon sells, I believe most do but some don’t), you should be able to connect the old Kindle to your computer, copy the files over, and then read them on your computer or copy them to some other device.
Thankyou, Mr Boink!
Since this is about hardware and not content, moved to IMHO (from Cafe Society).
This update has been out for a month or so. I was thrilled when it my Kindle. One of the neat things the new Kindles offered was the ability to predict how long the chapter you are reading would take to finish. This update brings that capability to the old Touches. It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty good rough estimate of how much reading you have left. neat!
I don’t think an eReader being obsolete is much of a big deal. Bugs aren’t found very often. It’s not like with a phone when new apps are coming out and you are missing out on them. New technologies in eReaders are usually manifest with the actual hardware, and not the software.
I just updated mine, took about 10 minutes from beginning to end.
As long as they’re still releasing updates, I’d hardly call it ‘discarded and kicked to the curb’. What else do you want them to do with it? ISTM you’re asking them to stop putting out new models but then people would accuse this one of being old/stale and demand a newer product. Who wants this one for Christmas when everyone else got it last year? I got my mom the newer one (with the buttons on the side, not the paperwhite). Other then the UI being slightly different to accommodate for not having a touchscreen, it seems about the same.
BTW, we (now) have locations, percentage and time until the end of the chapter, is there some reason we can’t just get page numbers at the bottom of the screen? I know they’re in there. If I want to know how many more pages I have until the end of a chapter, I hit the “Go To” button to see what page I’m on and then pull up the screen with the table of contents to see what page the next chapter starts on.
I understand the page numbers might not exactly coincide with turning the page on the Kindle it be a lot more helpful. I hate telling people “Oh, I’m reading The Hunger Games, yeah, I have about 27% of the book left.”
Do you mean location indicators? That’s on the bottom left. I’ve never notice mobi files having page numbers, normally they only use use location indicators. Am I mistaken?
I am mildly disgruntled over the change in font. Other than that, it doesn’t seem too earthshaking. oddly, the battery life indicator got smaller.
I know we have the location thing at the bottom, I’m asking why we can’t just have page numbers at the bottom. I know a lot of books have them. When you hit the ‘go to’ button it’ll show you the page number, why can’t it just put that at the bottom?
Also, what does the location reference anyways? Just like telling someone that you’re 34% of the way into a book, it’s equally annoying to tell someone that you’re at location 8910. It’s kinda meaningless.
ETA, regarding the update, I coulda done without it. It’s nice to have the book covers, but I’ll probably end up turning them off for two reasons. First off, I can’t even tell what some of the books are since you have to be able to read the cover, which isn’t always possible on the tiny black and white screen and second, it only shows three books on the first screen so it can run a row of Deals along the bottom.
Since the kindle can display in many font sizes, each “page” you are reading doesn’t correspond to a printed page. That’s why “page” isn’t included automatically. I think the publisher has to provide the information as to how the print version maps to the kindle version, and most don’t.
When I hit “go to” page isn’t an option for most of my books.