Amazon Shows Off Kindle 2

Amazon finally announced the Kindle 2 today after weeks of speculation from the blogosphere. Amazon made several improvements but most of them are just incremental enhancements. The price is still the same $359. Hopefully in this version Amazon has worked out their supply chain management issues. Since its launch the Kindle has suffered from supply issues. This past holiday season there was a 13 week wait on getting a new Kindle.

The bigger question is how Jeff Bezos can scale this beyond the Kindle device. Even though he has found a niche hardware business that is probably profitable it doesn’t scale to 100s of millions of people.  Beyond the tech savvy affluent few, not many people are going to be shelling out $350 on a device with a singular purpose. Especially when you can get a netbook for roughly the same price.

Palm Pre Will Change Things

People have been buzzing about the Palm Pre ever since its debut at CES. Before Palm’s announcement many people thought the company was going to be joining the dead pool. But now the whole blogosphere is talking about Palm’s rebirth. Google’s search engine is not returning any results and Apple’s Tim Cook is threatening litigation for anyone who copies the Apple iPhone. The whole mobile industry seems to be up in arms about the Palm Pre.

Palm packed a lot in this device and seemed to really exploit the flaws of the iPhone. Namely, the Palm Pre includes a removable battery, QWERTY keyboard, and it even has a copy paste feature. It also shows off a lot of innovation around gesturing and the way the UI is built. What is is remarkable about all of this is Palm was on the verge of going out of business and in less than a year came out with a device to rival the iPhone. It looks like Palm finally got its mojo back. And if Palm can get these devices to market quickly, word on the street is some time in February, then they could become a major player again in the mobile industry.