(Credit: mobileread.com)

Just got an e-mail from Alexander Turcic over at MobileRead.

Turcic, based in Switzerland, writes:

Hi David:

I hope you are doing fine. Got some news regarding Kindle 2 price and release info, plus the first Kindle 2 pics.

Cheers,
Alex

According to the post, the Kindle 2, which is expected to be announced Monday at 10 a.m. in New York, will be available on February 24 and carry a list price of $359--just like its predecessor. All in all, the device looks similar to what we saw in earlier leaked photos, but in these shots the Kindle 2 looks sleeker and decidedly more impressive. While we have no confirmation that this is the real deal, these look like marketing shots if I ever saw them.

More photos after the jump.

(Credit: mobileread.com)

(Credit: mobileread.com)

(Credit: mobileread.com)

(Credit: mobileread.com)

Click here for more stories on Amazon's Kindle.

One thing I've learned in the years I've been reviewing products is that design details matter, even if the eye at first skims over them. The shape of a button or placement of a key can mean the difference between delight and drudgery. So it's not surprising that subtle changes in Amazon.com's (AMZN) second-generation Kindle e-book reader make it a vastly better product than the original.

Introduced in late 2007, the Kindle was a breakthrough in the long-disappointing field of e-book readers. Despite its mediocre hardware design, Amazon's elegant solution for buying and downloading content over an invisible network made it a winner. With the Kindle 2 ($359), Amazon is at last offering a device that is as good as the rest of the system. The combination of the new hardware and its superior book-buying experience puts the Kindle 2 miles ahead of its only real rival, the $300 Sony (SNE) Reader.

Better-Placed Buttons

Using the new Kindle is nothing like reading e-books on a laptop. You can enjoy the device anywhere you can whip out a regular book and not worry much about how you hold it. This wasn't necessarily the case with the Kindle 1. So much of its surface was covered with buttons that I never knew quite where to put my hands, and I was forever unintentionally turning pages, jumping to the menu, or triggering some other disruption.

The Kindle 2's buttons are much smaller and better placed. The ones that turn pages have been redesigned and no longer respond to a stray press on the edge of the reader. The odd scroll wheel on the original Kindle has been replaced by a more traditional five-way navigation control of the sort used on many cell phones. These changes—a cleaner look overall and half the thickness (just over a third of an inch)—add up to a far more pleasant experience.

Amazon also either left alone or improved the parts that worked well. Delivery of books, magazines, and newspapers is done over the Sprint (S) wireless broadband network and requires no user registration or extra fees. Purchases are billed to your Amazon account, and the cost of the network is built into the price. (One downside: Amazon's choice of network technology, along with content-licensing issues, limits the Kindle to the U.S. market, at least for now.) A redesigned keyboard lets you check for titles in the Kindle store, search for text in a book, or add annotations or bookmarks.

There are other nifty improvements: The display, based on technology from E Ink in Cambridge, Mass., supports 16 shades of grey instead of 4. Power consumption, low to begin with, has been cut further, so the battery lasts for days at a stretch. Pages turn a bit faster, and the Kindle can even read text to you—though no one will confuse its synthesized voice with that of an audiobook. There's enough memory to store 1,500 books, so managing your library is likely to be a bigger problem than running out of space. If you have multiple Kindles, new or old, linked to the same Amazon account, downloaded content appears on all of them. And Amazon promises, a bit vaguely, the future ability to load Kindle books onto other devices.

Not Perfect in Dim Light

There are things that could be done to make the Kindle even better. The E Ink display, which relies on reflected light rather than the backlight used by a computer or phone screen, is easy on the eyes, provided the lighting is good. But, as with Kindle 1, the letters are dark grey on light grey rather than black on white and thus a little hard to read in dim conditions. And too often I find that the book I want isn't available, even though Amazon offers more than 200,000 titles. (Prices range from $1 to around $15, with most books going for $10.) One last gripe, which isn't going to change: Unlike a paper book, a Kindle title can't be sold or given away when you're done with it.

Ultimately, the best market for the Kindle may be as a replacement for huge, expensive textbooks. But textbooks need a low-cost, large-format display and, especially for K-12 education, color. E Ink is working on both, but neither is likely in the near term.

I still prefer the old-fashioned pleasure of reading ink-and-paper books. But a couple of weeks with the Kindle 2 is converting me. The ability to carry a whole library in a 10-oz. package makes it a reader's treasure.

The InfoTech 100

Which companies are logging the strongest growth, which industries are the hottest, and how the winners are faring in a treacherous economic climate

How do you pick the best-performing tech companies in the world? At BusinessWeek, we sort through the financial results of 30,500 publicly traded companies and rank the tech players on four criteria: shareholder return, return on equity, total revenues, and revenue growth. The companies leading the list are those with the lowest aggregate ranking.

Amazon.com and Apple took the top two spots this year. Still, the dominance of U.S. companies is in decline: The country has 33 companies among the IT 100 this year, down from 43 in 2007. When we first started compiling the list in 1998 to rank tech's top performers, 75 of the winners were U.S. companies.

NOTE: A more complete explanation of methodology is below the table.

Rank	Company Name	Industry*	Country	Revenues Millions	Revenues Rank	Rev. Growth Percent	Rev. Growth Rank	ROE Percent	ROE Rank	Shareholder Return Percent	Shareholder Return Rank	Profits Millions
1	AMAZON.COM	NET	U.S.	15,955.0	23	39	29	35	22	28	29	508
2	APPLE	COMP	U.S.	28,747.0	15	33	39	24	44	74	10	4348
3	RESEARCH IN MOTION	COMM	Canada	5,765.9	55	66	8	33	24	152	1	1241
4	NINTENDO	SOFT	Japan	14,876.5	25	73	5	21	60	55	17	2289
5	WESTERN DIGITAL	COMP	U.S.	7,448.0	47	44	25	36	19	64	12	866
6	AM?ICA M?IL	TELE	Mexico	28,761.5	14	33	40	46	10	10	56	5408
7	CHINA MOBILE	TELE	China	45,863.1	9	21	61	23	48	90	9	11780
8	NOKIA	COMM	Finland	73,344.4	6	24	55	49	8	8	60	10350
9	ASUSTEK COMPUTER	COMP	Taiwan	17,343.8	20	57	11	16	76	38	21	672
10	HIGH TECH COMPUTER	COMP	Taiwan	3,232.5	70	45	23	59	5	111	6	782
11	GOOGLE	NET	U.S.	18,116.1	18	51	16	19	70	22	36	4509
12	MTN GROUP	TELE	S. Africa	10,208.4	35	42	28	22	53	41	20	1480
13	IBM	COMP	U.S.	101,259.0	4	9	95	38	17	20	38	10893
14	MOBILE TELESYSTEMS	TELE	Russia	8,252.4	44	29	47	38	16	26	31	2072
15	TELEF?ICA	TELE	Spain	81,077.0	5	7	98	44	11	16	44	12793
16	VIMPELCOM	TELE	Russia	7,164.6	49	47	20	27	32	19	39	1463
17	HON HAI PRECISION IND.	COMP	Taiwan	40,876.4	11	45	22	23	50	-3	82	1853
18	AT&T	TELE	U.S.	120,703.0	1	58	9	11	95	4	68	12564
19	ACCENTURE	SVCS	U.S.	23,276.6	16	19	65	69	3	-3	83	1450
20	LG ELECTRONICS	COMP	Korea	56,834.8	8	15	81	15	81	151	2	1307
21	BHARTI AIRTEL	COMM	India	4,605.8	61	58	10	35	20	11	55	1016
22	ORACLE	SOFT	U.S.	21,020.0	17	24	57	24	43	11	52	5088
23	MICROSOFT	SOFT	U.S.	57,954.0	7	17	76	44	12	-3	84	16419
24	MAROC TELECOM	TELE	Morocco	3,495.6	65	22	59	46	9	49	18	1020
25	TURKCELL ILETISIM HIZMETLERI	TELE	Turkey	6,328.6	52	35	35	23	47	34	24	1350
26	LG DISPLAY	COMM	Korea	15,267.5	24	35	33	16	78	17	41	1430
27	NHN	NET	Korea	686.3	100	56	12	40	15	59	14	160
28	COSMOTE MOBILE TELECOM.	TELE	Greece	4,396.1	63	28	49	53	7	17	43	519
29	MILLICOM INTL. CELLULAR	TELE	Lux.	2,630.6	77	67	6	34	23	12	50	439
30	HEWLETT-PACKARD	COMP	U.S.	107,671.0	2	14	83	21	61	11	54	7850
31	COMPAL ELECTRONICS	COMP	Taiwan	11,838.4	32	44	24	12	94	18	40	271
32	SISTEMA	TELE	Russia	10,862.8	34	43	27	18	71	10	57	813
33	ORASCOM TELECOM	TELE	Egypt	4,545.8	62	35	32	36	18	5	66	755
34	SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS	SEMI	Korea	104,791.6	3	15	80	12	93	25	32	7894
35	CHINA UNITED TELECOMMUNICATIONS	TELE	China	13,594.1	30	25	54	10	98	64	13	762
36	MOBINIL	TELE	Egypt	1,471.9	92	29	48	104	2	36	22	327
37	CARSO GLOBAL TELECOM	TELE	Mexico	16,154.6	22	7	97	43	13	4	70	1156
38	KONINKLIJKE KPN	TELE	Neth.	17,900.1	19	4	99	59	6	-3	81	3810
39	CISCO SYSTEMS	COMM	U.S.	37,684.0	13	18	72	25	41	-4	86	8069
40	WISTRON	COMP	Taiwan	6,843.4	50	34	36	19	69	17	42	165
41	MOBILE TELECOMMUNICATIONS	TELE	Kuwait	6,038.0	54	39	30	20	64	13	49	1154
42	ACTIVISION	SOFT	U.S.	2,608.2	78	88	2	15	82	35	23	286
43	REDECARD	SVCS	Brazil	984.6	97	305	1	135	1	NA	78	385
44	CYPRESS SEMICONDUCTOR	SEMI	U.S.	1,695.6	87	43	26	26	36	23	34	378
45	ZTE	COMM	China	4,705.6	59	51	15	10	99	34	25	169
46	LENOVO GROUP	COMP	Hong Kong	14,590.2	27	10	94	14	86	91	8	161
47	TELEMAR NORTE LESTE	TELE	Brazil	9,645.8	39	4	100	20	67	111	5	1478
48	CORNING	COMM	U.S.	6,170.0	53	18	70	27	34	13	47	2852
49	PRICELINE.COM	NET	U.S.	1,390.8	93	24	56	27	33	129	4	157
50	TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MFG.	SEMI	Taiwan	9,826.4	37	19	66	25	39	2	73	3932

Amazon's new e-reader may be pretty, but it doesn't merit dropping another $359.

I'll admit it. I liked the Kindle more before it was an oversized iPod.

On Tuesday, Amazon customers began receiving the first shipments of the next generation of its digital reading device, the Kindle 2. Amazon's new e-reader uses the same innovative e-Ink screen and wireless connection that made the first Kindle a modest hit in the world of digital bibliophiles.

But it also promised a higher-contrast screen, faster page turning, more battery life and storage and, most importantly, a sleek new design that erases the clunky-looking asymmetry of Amazon's first crack at the gadget. In adding these features, however, the Kindle 2 mimics the rounded corners and white simplicity of an Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) device.

Still, the new Kindle is an impressively sleek piece of gadgetry. At just 0.36 inches thick, it's 25% thinner than the iPhone and a sheet of brushed aluminum replaces the last Kindle's rubber back panel. A "joystick"-like controller takes the place of the primitive two-way scroll wheel that powered the earlier Kindle's menus.

But after a few hours with Amazon's pretty new device, I found something surprising: For all its slender good looks, the new Kindle doesn't feel as natural for reading as its strangely shaped predecessor.

The first Kindle, now available only on eBay or other outlets where antique hardware languishes, is a sloping wedge that's wider on its left side, which allows readers to wrap their hands around the e-reader like a paperback with its cover folded back around the spine. Though bloggers, reviewers and, yes, even Forbes mocked the 1980s blockiness of the device when it was released in November 2007, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos claimed that the device was designed to "disappear." Once a reader became immersed in a book, the Kindle's look didn't matter so much as its ability to create a seamless reading experience. (See: "Let's Hope Kindle Is Only Chapter One")

With his second-generation device, Bezos seems to have forgotten the meaning of that mantra. The newer, thinner Kindle seems more interested in wowing customers with its iPod-like exterior than in comfortably filling the space between an index finger and a thumb. Its aluminum back panel is cold and slippery compared with the rubber grip on the back of the older version.

 

And while the new page-turning buttons--far smaller than those on the last model--are harder to press accidentally, they can require a split second longer to find with a thumb, momentarily interrupting the reading experience.

Amazon announced this afternoon that it has started fulfilling orders for its Kindle 2 e-book reader, one day earlier than anticipated. In the two weeks since February 9th’s announcement, the device has already become the number-one selling electronic device at Amazon.

At .036 inches, the new e-reader is thinner than a pencil. Among other improvements over the discontinued 14-month-old Kindle 1, the device-side buttons for turning pages now press inward instead of outward, minimizing inadvertent page turns.

While many had speculated that the $359 price would hinder sales, that doesn’t appear to have occurred. Indeed, the biggest contretemps involving the Kindle 2 has centered around its Nuance-provided text-to-speech voices (Tom and Samantha) and whether authors ought to be compensated when machines read the text aloud.

Pundits have pointed to the Apple chief as a possible savior for the auto industry.

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BURLINGAME, Calif.--Note to the auto industry: You want Steve Jobs? You can't handle Steve Jobs.

It's a cliché by now to suggest that all the U.S. auto industry needs is someone like the Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) chief executive. On paper, the idea makes sense. At Apple, Jobs turned a struggling has-been into a world-beating innovation factory. Wow, just think what he could do for General Motors (nyse: GM - news - people ).

The problem: The idea is completely idiotic. That's because if Jobs actually were installed at GM it would be the most chaotic day in American history since Gettysburg, except more people would die.

The suggestion comes amid doubts about Jobs' ability to continue running Apple, let alone a car company. Jobs will likely miss Apple's annual shareholder meeting Wednesday for the first time since rejoining the company in 1997, due to health problems. Last month, Jobs announced he will be taking a medical leave of absence until June. Moreover, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is said to be investigating what Apple has told investors about Jobs' health, even as his appearance became increasingly gaunt at public events throughout last year.

In short, if anyone thinks Jobs should run a car company, we can start with the fact that he is very much unavailable right now. Jobs is working on getting healthy again, one hopes, rather than thinking about his next career move. Blogger Robert X. Cringely reported Saturday that Jobs has not been online for weeks now, worrying his closest cronies.

But even if Jobs were to take the GM gig, how would he make a domestic car company more like Apple? Well, he could start by sending all the factory jobs to contract manufacturers in Asia. That would go over well with the United Auto Workers. But that's part of what makes Apple such a profit machine. It doesn't have to worry about the fixed costs involved with owning and operating a factory the way GM does.

What else would Jobs do? At Apple, he used secrecy to turn every new product launch into a media event. Jobs had few resources, and he knew he had to make the most of them. The result: Only a handful of Apple employees would know what Apple was about to introduce until Jobs unveiled it, usually only days before it went on sale. The move allowed Apple to get the most from radical, attention-getting designs like the 2002-era iMac G4. That, of course, would go over great with the federal regulators who oversee highway safety.

 

In short, the reason the auto industry doesn't need Jobs is that he wouldn't be able to make the Apple playbook work at a car company. To be sure, the suggestion does work as a sort of Swiftian vote of no confidence in the domestic auto industry. If read as a critique of the way the U.S. auto industry works now, rather than a serious suggestion, the idea has some merit.

An estimated 36.3 million people watched this year's Academy Awards, an increase of more than 4 million from last year's least-watched Oscars ceremony ever.

While ABC was heartened by the larger audience, especially among younger viewers, there are still only two Oscar telecasts on record with fewer viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Last year, when "No Country For Old Men" won best picture, the telecast was seen by 32 million people. The 2003 telecast, with "Chicago" as the best picture winner, was seen by 33 million people.

Hugh Jackman was the host of Sunday's show, where "Slumdog Millionaire" was the big winner. Among the earlier awards on the telecast was the late Heath Ledger's best supporting actor prize for "The Dark Knight."

At a time that the TV audience is fragmenting, Sunday's audience was the biggest for any prime-time entertainment program in two years, ABC said. The Golden Globes was seen last month by just under 15 million people.
The largest Oscars audience on record was in 1998, when 55.2 million watched "Titanic" win best picture.

A few weeks after launching the first wide-scale layoffs in its history, Microsoft Corp. admits it screwed up a key part of the plan.

The company is asking some laid-off employees for a portion of their severance back, saying an administrative glitch caused the software maker to pay them too much.

Lou Gellos, a Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) spokesman, would not say how many of the 1,400 workers let go in January were overpaid, or by how much. Microsoft has said severance would be calculated by length of service and position in the company.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker is asking former employees for reimbursement, by check or money order, within two weeks, according to a redacted letter posted by the technology blog TechCrunch. Gellos confirmed the letter's authenticity.

With the recession biting into sales of Microsoft's core Office and Windows software, Microsoft said in January it would let up to 5,000 of its 94,000 employees go, the only mass layoff in its 34-year history.

Shares of Microsoft sank 54 cents, or 3 percent, to $17.46 in afternoon trading amid a broader sell-off Monday.