Amazon on Thursday released significant upgrades to its Kindle app for iPhone and iPad. Just days after the company announced the new Kindle 3, Amazon’s made the iOS version of its e-reader even more competitive with its hardware device: The app now includes a dictionary with 250,000 entries, adds the ability to search within books on the iPad, and improves the experience of searching books on the iPhone and iPod touch.
Besides the new in-app dictionary—which lets you tap on any word to see its definition, much like the iBooks and BN eReader apps already offered—the updated Kindle app also lets you look up words in Google or Wikipedia. Unfortunately, looking up terms on either of those Websites requires that you exit the app. When you do feel the need to quit the app, however, you’ll be delighted to learn that Kindle finally supports fast app switching on iOS 4 devices.
The Kindle app is free and requires iOS 3.0 or later.