If you’re willing to cast aside the larger Kindle DX for just a moment, the recently released Amazon Kindle 2 is getting an update too. Would you be at all interested in adding some color to Amazon’s e-book reader? Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that a color upgrade for the Amazon Kindle 2 is now available. The bad news is that the upgrade has absolutely nothing to do with the grayscale e-ink display. Instead, we turn our attention to the guys at ColorWare for some bold new paintjobs. The Kindle 2 can be customized by the ColorWare crew, just as they do to a variety of other portable electronics.

Continue reading the review here.

Last year Amazon introduced their somewhat revolutionary electronic book reader called the Kindle, which we reviewed at launch time. Although the technology was excellent, the first Kindle had several design flaws that kept it on the far side of perfection. Recently Amazon brought out the next generation Kindle, aptly named the Kindle 2. We decided to check it out to see how the new Kindle stacked up to the original Kindle as well as other e-book readers.

Although packaging isn’t everything, last year we were impressed with the white book-like packaging of the Kindle. So this year we were surprised to find that Amazon has completely abandoned their attractive packaging for plain black Styrofoam and cardboard, shown in Figure 1.

Continue reading the review here.

As our original review of the first-generation Kindle pointed out, Amazon’s entry into the e-reader market wasn’t entirely trailblazing. Sony’s Reader and a variety of competing devices had already failed to make much of an impact on the market, despite a decade of trying. A marketing partnership between Sony and Borders to promote the Reader in the year prior to Kindle’s debut made little headway.

With the Kindle however, Amazon applied its global mail order experience and leveraged its enormous catalog of titles (and subsequent pull among publishers) to put additional momentum behind the push to drive print publications into ebook territory. However, the first generation Kindle also demonstrated the company’s lack of experience in building hardware.

The original Kindle was ugly and looked flimsy and cheap, ensuring that only the most avid of ebook users would pay for the privilege of test driving Amazon’s e-reader experiment. The company only shipped about a half million Kindle devices last year. That’s perhaps a significant achievement among e-readers but hardly the launch of a new mainstream way to access information.

Continue reading the review here.

Amazon.com Inc. on Wednesday plans to unveil a new version of its Kindle e-book reader with a larger screen and other features designed to appeal to periodical and academic textbook publishers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school’s chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences of students who get the Kindles and those who use traditional textbooks, he said.

Amazon has worked out a deal with several textbook publishers to make their materials available for the device, Mr. Gonick added. The new device will also feature a more fully functional Web browser, he said. The Kindle’s current model, which debuted in February, includes a Web browser that is classified as “experimental.”

Continue reading the review here.

When it was released in late 2007, Amazon.com Inc.’s original Kindle electronic book reader turned a lot of heads and, eventually, a whole lot of pages. The much- loved product redefined ebook readers, and was perpetually out of stock.

So what kind of revolutionary new product did Amazon produce as a follow-up? One that looks a lot like the first Kindle. The Kindle 2 is certainly a sleeker and faster version of the original device, but all in all, not much different.

A little background: The Kindle wasn’t the first ebook reader to feature an Eink screen (which uses tiny shape-shifting ink-like capsules to produce print-quality text without any of the eye strain of LCD screens). But it became a breakthrough product because its high-speed wireless connection (from Sprint Nextel Corp.) allowed users to quickly download new books directly to their device from anywhere in the U.S., without paying extra.

Continue reading the review here.

Has Amazon finally hit on the right formula with its second version of the Kindle e-book reader? According to TechCrunch, the company has already sold 300,000 of the devices (in less than two months) and expects to pump out 500,000 more before the end of the year. (Some analysts have even higher hopes for the device, with sales projections topping 1 million units.) Either way you cut it, that’s a huge win for Amazon.

To put those numbers in perspective, the company sold roughly 400,000 units of the original Kindle reader in its entire existence, which spanned nearly a year and a half. To say that Kindle 2 is selling at twice the rate of the original Kindle is a dramatic understatement. Based on those figures, the Kindle 2 is currently selling nearly ten times faster than Kindle 1.

Continue reading the review here.