Yesterday Amazon.com announced the debut of Amazon Kindle, a mobile book reader device. Not that books were ever not mobile, but carrying 200 book with you all the time could be a challange. That is how many books a Kindel can hold. Additionally it has a built-in dictionary with a vocabulary of 250,000 words and definitition. You can also subscribe to on-line newspapers and blogs. Amazon claims that the screen has a paper like display to create an experience similar to reading a book. Kindle weighs 10.3 ounces at costs $399. Amazon is backing the offering with a library of 90,000 books that can be downloaded and each is priced @ $9.99, regardless of the print price of the book.

The device has a EV-DO interface, which provides a high speed wireless access to the on-line store of the books, newpapers, and blogs, for over-the-air download. EV-DO data services are provided in partnership with Sprint, however, the users don't need to pay for the wireless access, it is available as part of the device price. The benefit of EV-DO is that you don't need hotspots to get on-line access. However subscription to on-line newspapers is required.

Amazon is taking on the long estabilished book and paper publishing houses and venturing to change old habits of reading a physical book. Books have not been around for ever, but none of us remeber stone of clay tablets or papyrus parchments. It is a bold move forward and I personally see some benefits of having a Kindle. I have to admit my vocabulary is not as good as I think and I can certianly benefit for the built-in dictionary.

Vodafone and Nokia announced an agreement to launch suite of integrated Vodafone services and Nokia Ovi Services on a range of 3G Nokia handsets. This is a big win for Nokia's Ovi given the speculations that launching Ovi Nokia will alienate its partner operators. The two companies also agreed that the new handsets will have two music services; one from Vodafone and another from Nokia.

If this joint offering is successful, one can expect that the consumers will start to have a broader choice of services. However, right now the agreement is exclusive to Vodafone. But still better that having services only from Vodafone. Once such a mashup of services expands where other operator services from Orange, Telefonica's, ATT, and Verizon are also integrated with services from Window Live and Yahoo's services, the potential of Web 2.0 will emerge. It may be too optimistic of me to soon. But it never hurts to dream big.