Australia gets Amazon Kindle DX

Were you excited by the local availability of the Amazon Kindle but held off buying one before Christmas? Good for you, you saved yourself the buyer's remorse associated with your favourite new gadget being superseded mere weeks after you managed to acquire it.

The new Kindle DX is 50 per cent bigger. (Credit: Amazon)

Amazon has announced that the larger Kindle DX is now also shipping internationally, offering Aussies the chance to read old favourites and new releases on a 9.1-inch e-ink display, up from a 6-inch on the original Kindle. The screen resolution is also higher, with the DX supporting a 1200x824-pixel image, which should help make text and images even sharper and easier on the eyes.

But the size increases don't stop there. The Kindle DX ships with 3.3GB of user accessible storage which Amazon estimates at about 3500 books. In addition to reading a range of ebook media formats the Kindle DX also supports PDF, Microsoft Word documents, JPEG images and MP3 music files. Like its predecessor, the DX comes with a 3G SIM card and free internet access for downloading new books from the Amazon catalogue. A new feature of the DX is the ability to rotate the display and read your texts in a landscape view.

Amazon is taking pre-orders for the DX now and plans to ship the first batch on 19 January. The extra 50 per cent screen size, resolution and storage will set you back almost twice as much, with the newer DX model costing US$489 plus shipping.