Hands on with Amazon's Kindle 2

The long-awaited Kindle 2 began shipping on Monday, and I've now had enough time with a demo unit to offer some initial impressions. Bottom line: If you liked the Kindle 1, you'll love the Kindle 2.

As has been previously discussed, the Kindle 2 is the same general concept as the original ebook reader, just amped up a notch all around. The new design is its most striking feature. While I sort-of liked the old Kindle's retro-jaggy form factor, many felt it was horribly ugly. The modernized Kindle 2 will generate no complaints from anyone. Like an overgrown iPhone, it's sleek and sophisticated and truly as thin as a pencil -- almost impossibly slim. My only complaint is with the design of the keypad buttons: The mildly convex keys don't stick up from the chassis quite enough, which makes typing on them slower than it should be. The slim profile makes the device incredibly portable, but it flexes a bit more than I'd like... I'm always worried it will break if I drop it.

The screen, which now displays 16 shades of gray instead of the old version's 4, looks great. Grayscale illustrations look very nice, the only real problem being the gray-not-white background that everything appears on top of. This is the same issue that many people had with original Kindle: Rather than crisp black on white, you're reading dark gray on light gray. In strong, direct light it's not a problem, but in dim conditions your eyes wear out fast.

Absolutely love the new dictionary: Just click over to any word using the five-way pad, and a definition pops up at the bottom of the screen. It's amazingly convenient -- but at the same time you can't help but wish that instead of a nav pad, the Kindle had a trackball and a real pointer or, better yet, a touchscreen so you could just tap the selection you want. If you do a lot of highlighting (though I doubt many Kindle users do), the nav pad gets tiresome quickly.

Overall, this is a great platform for reading a novel or anything where you just want to be able to pick it up and put it back down at a moment's notice -- the wireless delivery of books you order on Amazon's website is still just about perfect. But for "serious" reading -- textbooks or manuals, for example -- I find it a lot harder to deal with. Skimming is just not as easy as it is with dead tree books, and the screen can't show enough text at once to use the Kindle as a proper reference manual.

As a final note, there's the controversial text-to-speech system, and I assure you no one will be using this in lieu of a proper audiobook to have a novel read to them in the car. It's as good a computerized voice as I've heard, but it's still years -- maybe a decade -- away from human quality. (I cringe whenever the book says the word "know" aloud.) Maybe Authors Guild president Roy Blount is right that more natural-sounding technology is on the way that will make human-read audiobooks obsolete (and thus he'll be right that an additional payment should be made) -- but writers have nothing to worry about just yet.

$359? Still awfully expensive, to be sure. When Amazon figures out a way to get the Kindle down to $199, it'll fly off the shelves... and probably revolutionize reading as we know it.