Amazon Kindle 2

Would be remiss as an Amazon Associate to not cover yesterday's launch of the Kindle 2. Looking forward to reviewing one in person to find out if the overall feel of its hardware stacks up to the Sony Reader. Turns out the Sony Style stores are good for something! Perhaps Amazon should partner with Apple to stock Kindles. After all, Amazon does sell plenty of Apple hardware, and both companies effectively compete against Sony. Kindle's wireless Whispernet service is powered by Sprint instead of AT&T, but nobody knows that since Sprint sillily let Amazon gloss over the Sprint brand.

The only barrier to such a scenario is Steve Jobs who isn't sold on the Kindle because of some stat that only 40% of people in the U.S. read one or less books the other year. It's more likely that Steve has a full-color, full-featured, super-sized iPod über touch up his sleeve. Imagine how many of those Apple could move at $499! Better yet, get print publishers to subsidize them a la AT&T if readers commit to a two-year subscription of their favorite newspaper or weekly magazine. Hell, build 3G into the tablet, and have AT&T offer a subsidized version since they have more money to launch such an endeavor. Americans will read more books (and websites), listen to more music, watch more movies, and iChat with more friends if only Cupertino would bless us so.