The Kindle 2 has finally come out. There’s an article here about it,
by Wade Roush, one of the best tech reporters in the business.

In January, I did a blog entry about the original Kindle, which I am quite fond of.  I was just reading from it last night.

Here’s what I personally think about it, although if you use your differently from the way I use mine, you could have different feelings:

The internal memory expansion doesn’t really matter that much to me. The
first Kindle has plenty of space for books, which are very small, and
you can add a big SD card. If you use audio a lot it might help; I
don’t do that.

Thinner and lighter is nice, but the original Kindle is really fine in that regard.

More shades of gray is nice; not a huge deal but nice. I wish that
in books that had maps and diagrams, they’d include more of those in
the Kindle editions.

Just 20% faster is not a major qualitative change. The original Kindle is quite fast enough for me already.

Making the keys smaller is very clearly right, and I would
appreciate that a lot; I think this is the most important improvement. It’s hard to pick up an original Kindle without
hitting one of those buttons. I use a cool leather case (TuffLuv) that
can hold the Kindle up like a picture frame. My wife has one for hers
and uses this all the time.

Text-to-speech is a good idea. It would be very useful on long car drives.

Syncing across multiple Kindles could be useful, since we’re a 2-Kindle family, although we usually read different books.

The battery lasting 25% longer is nice, but the existing battery lasts a very long time already.

I’m glad to see that Amazon is continuing to improve this excellent product.