Nifty: Kindle owners in China gain access to banned web pages

The 3rd Generation Kindle with built-in Wi-Fi ($139, $189 for 3G) is one of the best gadgets on the market. It’s bookishly chic, weighing only 8.7oz (the iPad weighs 1.6lbs), boasts a month of battery life and provides storage for about 3,500 books.

In China, the new 3G Kindle is proving to be an invaluable tool to circumvent the country’s strict web censorship. According to the South China Morning Post, Amazon’s Whispernet network allows the GSM device to bypass China’s online security, allowing Chinese Kindle owners to surf previously banned web pages like Facebook and Twitter.

Amazon says that its not able to ship the Kindle to mainland China at this time but Kindles are quickly being bought on China’s grey market with prices ranging from 700 yuan (105 dollars) to 5,000 yuan. The Kindle might be more successful than Google’s previous attempts at breaking down web censorship in China, which is the world’s largest Internet community with 420 million web users.

“I still can’t believe it. I casually tried getting to Twitter, and what a surprise, I got there,” the local paper quoted a mainland blogger as saying. “And then I quickly tried Facebook, and it perfectly presented itself. Am I dreaming? No, I pinched myself and it hurt.”