Hat tip to an alert reader on The Digital Reader for this one. As far as we knew, when the Kindle Paperwhite came out last year, Amazon retired the Kindle Touch. But now it looks like they plan to continue selling it, at least for a while.
You can only find it through a search. It’s not listed on the Kindle comparison page, but if you’re interested, you can find it here. I’m guessing they brought it back some time this month. I did a search back through reviews, and reviews from February and January were primarily for “Certified Refurbished” Touches. Then in March, the proportions switched back to reviews of new items.
Why would you want a Touch over a Paperwhite? Two reasons: Text to Speech and more memory. Lots of people were disappointed when they discovered the Paperwhite was lacking a speaker, and therefore was also lacking TTS. It’s an important accessibility feature, and I think Amazon made a mistake by dropping it from the Paperwhite.
More storage may or may not matter to you. Some readers keep their entire library on their Kindles. Others only keep their ‘to be read’ books on it. It’s nice to have the option, though.
I really like my Touch. I thought about upgrading to a Paperwhite (mostly because of the increased font selection), but I decided to stick with the Touch. It’s a nice device and has served my needs well. Glad to see it’ll be around for a while. I hope they release a few more software updates for it.
I am with you. The lack of TTS on the PaperWhite prevented me from purchasing. I was in the 1st wave of Kindlers, back in 08 and found it a bit sad (just for a minute) that they came out with one that seemed, IMO, to regress rather than progress.
Since Amazon purchased Ivona, I hope that the PaperWhite’s next iteration will have the TTS component.