Pretty much everyone's talking about eBooks and eBook readers nowadays, this brand of devices managing to move from a fairly niche segment to mainstream status over a very short period of time. And the one device that begun this revolution by providing a comprehensive combo between an online content store and an actual physical device is Amazon's Kindle portable eBook reader, which was initially launched back in the second half of 2007.

Since then, the Kindle has undergone a major hardware overhaul, its second iteration, simply dubbed the Kindle 2, officially arriving in stores in February 2009. Furthermore, Amazon decided to launch a wider-format Kindle as well (the newspaper and magazine-oriented Kindle DX), but also to finally allow customers from other countries all over the world to enjoy this very interesting product, with the launch of the Kindle 2 International Version in October 2009.

Over the course of time, we've kept track of pretty much everything Amazon and its Kindle have achieved, so we obviously loved actually going hands-on with a Kindle 2 unit. Of course, since this is the first Kindle we tested (hopefully, not the last either), we weren't really able to carry out some comparative tests to the previous version, so what you'll read about as follows refers just to this incarnation of the device and that's pretty much it.

As usual, we won't go into too many details regarding the Kindle 2 in this introductory segment. We will point out, however, that there are a couple of specific areas where we've found this version to be slightly inferior to its US-only counterpart, most being related rather to the lack of support from local mobile carriers rather than something being wrong with the actual device.

Overall, the Kindle 2 experience was a very pleasant one, and we've really managed to see why Amazon hopes that it will become the “iPod of portable eBook readers.” Hopefully, you'll manage to see that as well, after going through our review.