Amazon launches Kindle Touch, Kindle Fire, Silk browser

Amazon has unveiled four new Kindle e-readers and a new browser, Silk, that runs partially in the cloud.

The four Kindles include a Wi-Fi only, smaller and lighter keyboardless version of the current Kindle, costing $79 in the US and £89 in the UK. It is available immediately in both countries.

The $99 Wi-Fi-only Kindle Touch and the $149 3G Kindle Touch 3G replace all the controls of previous devices with an infrared touchscreen. These will be available from November 21 in the US. UK availability and pricing have not been announced.

All three use a 6 inch monochrome e-ink display similar to the previous Kindles, which remain available as the Kindle Keyboard and the Kindle Keyboard 3G.

The fourth new e-reader is the $199 Kindle Fire, an Android-powered dual-core tablet with a colour LCD 7-inch screen, a custom Amazon user interface and audio, video and book content management. With free Amazon cloud storage for content, the Fire is Wi-Fi only and uses Amazon's Silk web browser. Also only available in the US for now, it will ship from November 15.

Silk is a split-processing browser, with the tablet and Amazon's EC2 cloud sharing the tasks of loading, displaying and acting on web pages. "All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely", Amazon said in a blog post detailing the new technology.