Gearfuse

We haven’t been talking about the Amazon Kindle 2 a lot. Know why? Because everyone and their mother has been talking about it. Jeff Bezos was even on The Colbert Report shilling his new eBook reader. Interestingly, though, when the boys at iFixIt cracked open a brand new Kindle 2, they found a surprise waiting inside. See that circled area on the PCB? That’s a space for a SIM card. And something tells me, that with a soldering iron, a SIM card holder and some programming, you could turn the Kindle 2 into an entirely new device. Perhaps you could even speed up the downloads of eBooks and digital content.

Any ideas? What do you think that missing SIM slot is for?

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Do you read books? Excellent, but what about e-Books? They’re like books, except they are electronic. Don’t you understand the paradigm here? Get with the 21st century, McFly! Yesterday morning, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Kindle 2. It’s better than the original Kindle and just as expensive, costing $359 which will ensure it doesn’t sell like hotcakes. Here’s the feature breakdown:

* Thinner: 0.36 inches thick, 25% thinner than an iPhone
* Quicker: Turns pages 20% faster
* Longer lasting: 25% increase in battery life
* Better display: 16 shades of gray (was 4)
* Bigger memory: Stores up to 1,500 books
* Bigger vocabulary: Built-in 250,000 dictionary
* Better navigation: With a 5-way joystick
* More vocal: Able to read text aloud in a semi-robotic voice
* Less accident prone: The page-turn buttons are smaller and harder to hit by mistake
* More wired: New Whispersync technology (more below)

Well, well Mr. Bezos. It seems you’ve foiled us again. Oh wait. How much is a book from the Amazon store? $9.99? No thanks.

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