Amazon’s Kindle 2 is a new techie device created for the readers of personal and professional documents, newspapers, and magazines–and textbooks, which is a potentially huge target market.
The sequel to the popular Amazon Kindle, number 2 has a few nifty tricks up its sleeve to leave other e-readers looking more like comic books than the library of novels that the Kindle 2 is. First of all its cool keyboard. Then there’s also 3G technology.
According to Amazon’s Kindle DX page, the device has the following:
• A 9.7-inch display with 16 shades of gray. (The standard Kindle has a 6-inch display.)
• Capacity to hold up to 3,500 books, periodicals, and documents.
• An auto-rotating screen to show either portrait or landscape views.
• A built-in PDF reader.
• 3G wireless network support with no monthly fees or annual contracts.
• Battery capacity to “read for days without charging.”
• Text-to-speech abilities to read publications aloud.
Several of those features are shared with the current Kindle 2, but several are unique to the Kindle DX: the native PDF reader that doesn’t require the files to be converted, the rotating display, the 3,500-publication capacity compared to 1,500 for the Kindle 2, and of course the larger screen.
