Amazon’s Kindle e-Reader, Take II

As expected, the new version of the Amazon Kindle e-reader is here, debuting to mixed reviews. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced the Kindle 2 on Monday in New York, highlighting the fact that it’s thinner than the iPhone, and offers seven times the storage of the original Kindle. Now, digital book aficionados can carry around up to 1,500 books. But is it threatened by the smartphone category?

Despite pre-launch rumors to the contrary, the Kindle doesn’t synch with the Apple iPhone or other smartphones. The intelligent handset market increasingly has access to e-reader applications. That’s a fact that could make the single-purpose, non-voice-enabled Kindle irrelevant.

So it’s no wonder the new Kindle packs in a passel of differentiating features. “Our vision is every book, in every language, ever printed, available in 60 seconds,” said Bezos.

The new Kindle has a 25 percent better battery life, and is just over a third of an inch thick. New buttons for navigation make it easier to flip pages, while a five-way controller lets people take notes and highlight text. For those upgrading from the first Kindle, the “Whispersync” feature automatically synchs content for the Kindle 2. And vocabulary from the New Oxford American Dictionary pops up at the end of the page should a reader desire and reader notes can be pulled down from the cloud on demand.

The business model remains the same: The Kindle 2 runs on Amazon’s own MVNO network that it pays for itself, charging users only to purchase the digital books themselves.

The number of books available and the extra features are not things that smartphones –even the iPhone’s “Stanza” app – can offer today.

The Kindle 2 retails for $359 and is available for pre-order now. It will ship Feb. 24.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines