Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Update: I was wrong. It’s not an international release. You can pre-order Kindle 2.0 now, even though it won’t ship for another 2 weeks or so (Feb 24th). I think it might sell out before that date.

The signs are obvious that Kindle 2 is going to be an international release – at the minimum Kindle 2 will be available in the UK and Canada. It’s almost certainly going to have WiFi and might even have GSM. This is an educated guess based on several facts - the first set of facts is who works for Lab126, and who they were hiring for -

1. Lab126 was hiring for a Baseband Engineer and stated -
   

   *Your primary responsibility will be the integration of baseband circuits into Lab126 products. This may include the development and optimization of various wireless solutions including 802.11, CDMA, UMTS and Bluetooth.
   *[Requirement] Experience integrating wireless chipsets from leading vendors such as Qualcomm, Freescale, Broadcom or TI into CDMA or GSM / UMTS devices. Experience with other wireless technologies, such as 802.11 or GPS and associated chipsets is also desirable
   *[Requirement] Experience developing 802.11, GSM, CDMA or UMTS in wireless handsets or similar applications.

2. They were also hiring a RF Engineer with similar requirements -
   

   *[Primary Responsibility] Responsible for RF and wireless integration at Lab126. This may include the development and optimization of various wireless technologies including 802.11, CDMA, UMTS and Bluetooth.
   *[Requirement] Experience in at least one of the following: GSM, UMTS, CDMA, 802.11.

3. Another interesting hire is a Power Management Systems Engineer, one of whose responsibilites will be ”Optimization of RF systems for power (CDMA, UMTS, GSM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc)”. 
   

   WiFi + GSM related Lab 126 jobs

4. We’ve discussed their Internationalization/Globalization expert who has a lot of internationalization expert with Yahoo and other companies and has been presenting at unicode.org conferences, including talking on -
   

   processing text in different languages; preparing for the localization (translation) of user interfaces; making applications “locale-aware” … approaches to delivering multi-lingual and multi-locale software or content.

5. They already have 1 employee who lists “extensive experience in WiFi, Bluetooth and IP protocols. Experience with WiFi security”. Those are the only skills he mentions so it’s obviously his specialization.
6. In addition there are two old job postings ( HQE1, HQE2) that indicate they’re looking to hire two hardware quality engineers with ‘ 3+ years of experiences with WAN/WiFi compliance testing and requirements ‘. 

The reason that all this information is available is that Google caches links and pages – so even if you remove links to pages or delete pages, they don’t disappear for a long time. 

Lets move on to a little bit of reading the tea leaves -

1. The earlier list shows multiple people hired for their “GSM, UMTS, CDMA, 802.11, BlueTooth” skills, and another set of people hired for WiFi expertise.  
2. If the Kindle 2 leaked pictures (with little visual change from Kindle 1) are valid – obviously, over a year was spent developing mostly software and internal hardware. Perhaps the killer Kindle 2 features are internationalization, GSM and wifi.
3. There were strong rumors Kindle’s UK release in the Fall was delayed because Amazon couldn’t get a Sprint like arrangement with a UK carrier. A month or so later, TechCrunch’s ‘source’ claimed Mr. Bezos pushed Kindle 2 out to next year. There’s a possibility the delay was to incorporate UK and Canada support into Kindle 2.  
4. Amazon has to be seeing the strong demand worldwide, not to mention Sony’s release in the UK. It can’t afford losing out on the international audience.

Kindle 2 is going to be an international release – UK, Canada, and perhaps worldwide. Its probably going to use WiFi, although GSM is not out of the picture. You heard it here first.

Filed under: availability, kindle 2 Tagged: | kindle in canada, kindle in uk