Amazon’s Kindle 2 is sleek, stylish, and has a crisp and easy-on-the eyes “electronic ink” display. But it only does one thing — read books.

After all the relatively hostile things I have said about Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader in the past, I didn’t actually expect that the company’s official PR firm, Outcast, would actually send me one to play with. In Mid-March, they contacted me to inform me that they were going to loan me one for ten days, after which I had to send it back, this due to the extreme demand for review units. Ouch! The first Kindle I looked at, I had 30 days to play with the device.

Of course, I was literally on the bottom of their list to receive one, no doubt due to my less-than-warm opinions of their product that were expressed during the launch and the actual release timeframe. Our gallant Editor-In-Chief, Larry Dignan, got one first at the end of February, along with the other “Tier 1″ consumer electronics writers like Walt Mossberg and David Pogue who had their widely-publicized reviews published weeks ago. I think Larry took one look at it and put it on the shelf and gave it a thorough ZDNet Labs (TM) dust accumulation benchmark before sending it back. Gee, thanks boss.

Continue reading the review here.