Will Kindle be able to kindle interest?

Amazon may announce the second version of Kindle sometime next month and everybody wants to know what features it will include

Will Kindle be able to kindle interest?

Amazon may announce the second version of Kindle sometime next month and everybody wants to know what features it will include

If there was not a recession going on, we could almost feel that these were the good old days of the dot com boom.

Success story

And we all hope that the wait will be worth it. When Kindle was first launched in November 2007, it is said that they were sold out within a mere five and a half hours and the device is said to have remained out of stock until late April 2008. While this shows great demand, it also shows some poor inventory management at Amazon.

What makes the Kindle so special is the fact that it is not just a book reader, though it can typically hold some 200 titles. Kindle uses the Amazon Whispernet over the Sprint EVDO network, and this means that you can download or buy books on the go without a computer. Of course, one negative feature is that, since Whispernet is only available n the US, you can't use Kindle in other countries currently, though one can expect this to change soon.

And since the first version of Kindle has been quite popular, people are today waiting to see what Kindle 2 will do, in case it gets launched in February. The company has remained tight lipped about sales of even the first avatar of Kindle, though usatoday.com reports Mark Mahaney, director of Internet research at Citigroup Investment Research, as estimating that Amazon sold about 400,000 units last year and that Kindle hardware and book sales will contribute about $1 billion to Amazon's revenue in 2010.

Hype factor

In a way, Amazon seems to be very good at what companies belonging to the dot-com era did extremely well hype. But it has also sold over 4 lakh Kindles, so it is clear that it has got an ace up its sleeve.

Copies of a photo of a device that has been alleged to be Kindle 2 have been floating all over the Internet for some time now. The one we have featured here, which was taken from boygeniusreport.com, has been criticised by many sites as being excessively plain.

Maybe, if you will let me play the speculative journalist here, this is what Amazon wants they want to deliberately build up a lot of hype and deliver a product that functions well and doesn't have frills. There could be some truth in this after all, your average book lover is a very different breed when compared to somebody who loves a sleek music player, right?

Surely, if this is the product that Amazon wants to launch, then they will be praying that this is true.

QUICK TAKE
>>Amazon may launch Kindle 2 in February
>>The product is being eagerly anticipated by the tech community
>>While it can currently work only in the US, it is hoped that it will soon be available in India

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