There’s been a lot of anticipation about what Amazon would do for an encore to its much-hyped e-book reader, the Kindle, and now that it’s finally here we can say that the Kindle 2 is about what we expected it to be. Talk of it being a huge leap forward or going from generation one to generation five in one fell swoop was really, well, just talk.

In reality, the Kindle 2 is a nice upgrade over the original Kindle; yes, it leaves off a couple of key items–most importantly removable memory and a protective carrying case–but it makes up for it with a slicker design, improved performance, increased internal memory, built-in speakers, and a new feature, Text-to-Speech audio reading.

That’s all you need to know in a nutshell. But I did write about 2,500 more words on the device if you want the full skinny on Amazon’s Kindle 2.

Continue reading the Kindle 2 Review.