Adding to the e-book “revolution”, Amazon updated its Kindle to version 2.0. In case you don’t know, the Kindle is an e-book reader that uses E-Ink technology to closely imitate the properties of a real book. Among these include really crisp text, no glare, readability under the sun, and no backlight.
The new Kindle is slimmer than the first generation, has a better screen with 16 shades of gray, a longer battery, faster page turns (20% faster), more storage (2GB), and weighs 10.2 ounces. Like the previous version, the new Kindle allows you to download books over the Whispernet connection (via Sprint’s 3G network) in less than 60 seconds and though the same connection, you also have free access to Wikipedia. The design of the new Kindle is much better than the old one which sometimes turned pages accidentally. It also as an experimental feature that allows the Kindle to read text to you through text to speech technology. Although the voice is quite robotic, it is kind of nice to have if you are on a car and you want to listen to a book, but this isn’t nearly as good as a real audiobook. On the Kindle, you can also listen to music and podcasts as well as view images and PDFs, though the PDFs need to be converted first.
Although I’m not extremely fond of e-books, the idea is great as you can just carry the one device in replacement of all the books and other text that you carry around.
CNET Video of the Kindle:
More info:
Official Kindle information from Amazon (Includes videos)
Images from Amazon.Com