Amazon announces new devices, including HD Kindle Fire

Amazon's new lineup of devices includes a Kindle Fire tablet with HD and other new features as well as a back-lit e-reader called the Kindle Paperwhite.

Amazon announced several new Kindle devices at a press conference yesterday, including a back-lit e-reader (Amazon's answer to the Barnes & Noble Nook Glow) called the Kindle Paperwhite.

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO,  introduced the new devices during a press conference in Santa Monica, Calif. yesterday. In addition to the Kindle Paperwhite, a black-and-white device that lets you read in the dark and which Bezos described as “thinner than a magazine and lighter than a paperback,” the company is adding a Kindle Fire HD device, which will come in models that are 7 inches and 8.9 inches, respectively.

The 7-inch model will be 16GB and the 8.9-inch version will be available as a 16GB model, both of which will be with Wi-Fi, or one with 32GB, which will come with 4G LTE connectivity.

The Kindle Paperwhite is available in both Wi-Fi and 3G options. The Wi-Fi version will come in at $119 and the 3G model will cost $179. The 7-inch Kindle Fire HD will be $199, while the 16GB model of the 8.9 inch version will be $299 and the 32GB will be $499.

The Kindle Fire originally released by the company will now be $159 and have double the RAM and an upgraded processor that is expected to give speeds that are 20 percent faster.

The Kindle Fire HD will include new features such as the X-Ray option for movies, which allows users to tap on an actor in a film and be taken to his or her IMDb page to see other credits. X-Ray for textbooks is also available, in which a reader can select a word and be taken to its Wikipedia entry, videos on YouTube related to it, and other Internet instances of the word.

The Kindle Touch device will now be $69 but also contain advertisements.