Amazon Kindle App For iOS Gets An Update [Amazon Rolls Out iOS Kindle Update, Adds Instant Word Lookup, Improvements To Search & Fast App Switching For iOS 4]

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Amazon surprised plenty of us with the new Kindle yesterday. And for those who may have missed the announcement, Amazon is now offering the Kindle in a 3G and a Wi-Fi-only model. The 3G Kindle is priced at $189 and the Wi-Fi Kindle is priced at $139. Furthermore, each of these models will be available in either white or graphite. But moving past the hardware Kindle and into the software. Or more specifically, the Kindle app for iOS devices which has been updated as of this morning.

And as a Kindle reader on the iPad, I must say this is a welcomed update. First things first, this update brings the version up to 2.2. And as you would expect, it remains available as a free download.

That said, lets dive into what the latest version of the Kindle app has to offer which includes some new features, some improvements and some bug fixes.

In terms of new, the Kindle app now has a built-in 250,000 word dictionary which will reveal itself after you highlight and prepare to search for a word. The first time you attempt you will be presented with a “dictionary not found” message, but rest assured, the dictionairy simply has to be downloaded to your device. Seems a little strange that would not have just come down in the update, but not knowing how may MB’s the dictionary takes up, Amazon may have done this to keep the app size down. After all, it already sits at 6.1MB.

Another new feature is the ability to search a highlighted word or phrase on Google or Wikipedia. These of course, will launch Mobile Safari, which as an iPad user I wish they had done this search with a built-in browser. But that is likely not the case because this version of the Kindle app also added in support for fast app switching, which is something the iPhone users will be able to take advantage of now.

Furthermore, also added was;

• Search inside the book on the iPad
• Improved experience for searching inside the book on the iPhone and iPod touch
• Improvements to the line-spacing on the iPad

In the end, a welcomed update, though given the Google and Wikipedia search option — I will be much happier when Apple finally rolls out iOS 4 for the iPad.