There are rumors circulating that Amazon’s Kindle 2 E-book reader has been delayed and won’t make its pre-holiday target release date. Actual release is said to be sometime during Q1 of 2009.

Rumor has it that the device was on schedule for its target date until Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, demanded last minute software changes.

The Kindle was released one year ago and sold out within hours of its release. The highly popular device has the ability to wirelessly purchase and download books from the Amazon website through connectivity to Verizon’s EVDO network.

Most recently, Oprah has endorsed the reading device as a "must have" for anybody serious about reading.

The second-generation device is supposed to have design improvements over its predecessor while including a "power-over-usb" feature. No official specs have been released yet.

When the Hybrid Dual Portable Computer was introduced two years ago, the premise was thus: mobile OS up front, Windows XP inside and about as pretty as a duck dipped in oil. Well, that duck has officially been scrubbed clean. The new shell is pretty sleek, is it not?

It’s not just aesthetics that have been tweaked, however. The unit now contains an Atom processor inside. The exact specifications of the Atom has yet to be revealed though.

Other than that, the specifications remain the same. It contains an e-book reader, PMP, netbook and even an in-car rear-view camera monitor. Oh yeah, it also makes phone calls.

No information has been released yet regarding price or availability. Let’s hope that scrubbed duck doesn’t cost it’s weight in gold.

I find the dedicated e-book reader concept a little dubious, given the plethora of other devices that can do the same sort of thing. Their primary advantage, of course, is the use of "e-paper" technology (in this case, E Ink’s Vizplex version) that provides a high resolution and doesn’t require power to maintain the image. Thus, the Cybook Gen3 e-book reader, to be released sometime in September, is rated at 8,000 page turns rather than by time (we all read at different speeds, of course). Cybook will be working with Mobipocket, giving it instant access to 50,000 titles, which is a plus, but of course that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the Library of Congress. Being sold in packs, it’ll start out at $350.