Amazon's next-generation portable eBook reader (or wireless reading device, as they call it), the Kindle 2, has been one of the hottest subjects of early 2009, the Internet getting literally filled up with all sorts of rumors and speculations related to it. However, now that it's officially arrived, and the first models are starting to reach customers, we're also seeing a wave of reviews and other related materials appearing, perhaps one of the most interesting being the one carried out by iFixit.

So, the guys over at iFixit have recently received their Kindle 2 and immediately begun a very painful operation, namely that of dissecting the portable reader. And what they found was a mixture of more or less boring stuff (pretty much everything they'd expected, but also a few interesting surprises).

Without a doubt, the most exciting thing unveiled by this dissection process is the presence of an outline of a SIM card with empty headers, located on the center-left side of the mainboard. Amazon has purposely left an opening in the plastic framework revealing this region, but the fact of the matter is that it has provided absolutely no info regarding its purpose. Is it just for development and debugging purposes, as iFixit implies, or is there something more?

If the SIM card profile has been placed there with a very definite purpose, namely that of perhaps hosting a SIM card slot in the future, then this really makes us wonder: does Amazon plan to eventually turn the Kindle into a communication device?

Well, it's not impossible, and it would really bring about a very powerful competitor on the market, but I'm pretty sure that it will never go against the more established names in the industry, given the fact that the other hardware components (also described in the aforementioned article) are far from the level of performance required by most high-end smartphones nowadays. On the other hand, perhaps Amazon is targeting the entry-level market or is simply considering voice conversations as an alternative function... but this is just speculation, at least for the time being.


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