Amazon Unveils Kindle 2 E-book With “Talk-to-Me” Feature

Kindle 2, released by Amazon today, takes off from where the original
Kindle features came to an end. It claims a 25% increase in battery life
and it can hold as many as 1,500 books with its 2GB memory. Kindle 1 had
a capacity for only 200 books.

Perhaps the neatest feature of Kindle 2 is & to me & that
enables Kindle to read the book aloud for you, albeit in a monotonous
robotic voice. You can select between male and female voices. The Kindle
Store offers customers a selection of more than 230,000 books.

The new iteration of Kindle will cost the same as the earlier version -
$359 and will ship February 24 onwards. Kindle 2 is a little more than
one-third of an inch thick and weighs just 10 ounces. The device
facilitates note-taking and text highlighting via a new five-way
controller. It also features buttons for turning pages. The wireless
connectivity with Kindle 2 is powered by Sprint.

Other developments over Kindle 1 include 16 shades of gray on the
600×800 electronic paper display as against 4 shades on the
original Kindle. A single charge will keep Kindle 2 on for five days
with the wireless turned on and for two weeks with the wireless turned off.