Kindle 2: On Feb. 9 this year, Amazon announced the much awaited and updated version of Kindle, which became available in the market for purchase on Feb. 23. Named as Kindled 2, with a price tag of $359, this sleek product is certainly a generation ahead of its earlier version.
For the uninitiated, Kindle 2 is an e-book reader developed by Amazon.com. An e-book reader sure has an edge over the readers of printed books. The big plus of an e-book reader is that it is portable and can carry thousands of books in a single paper-back sized device. You can also download books from the Internet or subscribe to blogs, newspapers or magazines and access them on the go.
However, until this version of Kindle 2, e-book readers had issues like eye-strain, the power usage and the lack of availability of popular books. But with Kindle 2’s launch, these concerns are alleviated.
One could not have asked for a better combination than the world’s biggest book distributer, Amazon.com, and an e-book reader. As expected, when Kindle’s earlier version was launched, the entire stock was sold out within 6 hours, making it a massive hit. But later, the readers demanded more detailed attention to the next version of Kindle.
Now, Kindle 2 is loaded with even more attractive and enhanced features, such as a text-to-speech option which can read aloud the text in male and female voices, an improved battery life, thickness reduced from 0.8inches to 0.36 inches, which makes it thinner than even an iPhone, and 20 percent faster refreshing of the pages. Amazon estimates that Kindle 2 can hold up-to 1500 books with its internal memory of 2GB out of which 1.4GB is usable.
Readers would be glad to know that the New York Time Best-Sellers and new releases are offered at as little as $10. Readers can also subscribe to newspapers, blogs or magazines on their Kindle 2 device itself. The monthly charges would be a meager $6-15 for newspapers, $1-2 for blogs and $1.25-3.49 for magazines. Classics which are sold for as high as $30 in printed formats can now be available for only $2.
Amazon could have made it even better had it taken care of issues such as supporting the files with PDF or Word, a protective carry case, a slot for memory expansion, battery being irremovable, and by making the hardware and content a bit cheaper.
But what could really hold the customers back is heavy price of $359 in a badly hit economy.
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