www.apple.com/ipod/start

“In order to ensure we ship Kindle 2 by the original ship day of Feb. 24, we started shipping one day early,” said Ian Freed, vice president of the Amazon Kindle, in a statement.

BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhuanet) — Amazon.com said it began shipping its Kindle 2 e-book reader on Monday, a day earlier than originally planned.

The Seattle-based online retailer said the next-generation Kindle, priced at 359 U.S. dollars, is already the No.1 seller on its Electronics website, just a little over two weeks after it had been launched on Feb. 9.

The new Kindle keeps the same price as the first version of the e-reader, but is thinner and includes upgraded features.

The company said the Kindle 2 has been enhanced with 25 percent longer battery life, and the electronic pages turn 20 percent faster on average. It can store more 1,500 books — instead of 200 in the previous version — and can read text aloud from two small speakers on its back.

Amazon originally unveiled the Kindle in November 2007. With the Kindle, Amazon hopes to change the publishing industry and the way people read books the same way Apple changed the music industry and the way people listen to music with the iPod.

Jon Rubinstein, a former executive behind Apple Inc.’s iPod, on Wednesday was named chief executive of smartphone maker Palm Inc., replacing Ed Colligan who is stepping down after 16 years with the company.

Rubinstein began at Apple in 1997 as senior vice president for hardware engineering. He helped lead the rollout of the iMac and later headed up the iPod division.

On Monday, Apple halved the price of its 8-gigabyte iPhone 3G, which came out last year, to $99.

Palm shares rose 44 cents, or 3.7 percent, to $12.43 in after-hours trading Wednesday, after closing down 71 cents, or 5.6 percent, at $11.99. Apple shares fell $2.47 to close the regular session at $140.25.

The appointment, effective Friday, comes just days after Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Palm launched the $199 Pre, a well-regarded rival to Apple’s blockbuster iPhone device. One of Pre’s signature features is that it syncs with the iTunes music store just like an iPod or iPhone.

Rubinstein, 52, will remain chairman — dropping “executive” from that title — a post he assumed in October 2007 to help bring innovation back to the company. He said in a statement he is excited about his expanded role.

“With Palm webOS we have 10-plus years of innovation ahead of us, and the Palm Pre is already one of the year’s hottest new products,” he said.

Last month, Rubinstein said at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif., that he didn’t worry about Pre’s iTunes capability annoying his former employer.

“We’re trying to make customers happy,” he said. “It’s a great feature.”

Sprint, the exclusive carrier for the Pre, said the phone’s weekend launch broke first-day and first-weekend sales records for a Sprint device. Sprint Nextel Corp. CEO Dan Hesse said last month he expected demand to outstrip supply early on.

The Pre, which looks like an iPhone but sports a slide-out keyboard in addition to a touch screen, is seen as Palm’s chance to reverse a long backward slide and take on newer smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry.

In its fiscal third quarter, which ended in late February, Palm reported a wider loss as sales of its phones fell 42 percent year-over-year to 482,000.

Palm said Colligan, who had also served as president, plans to take some time off before joining Menlo Park, Calif.-based private equity firm Elevation Partners.

The gadget would run on Google Inc’s Android software, the people told the paper.

Dell Inc, the worlds No.2 PC maker, is developing a pocket-sized device for tapping into the Internet, the Wall Street Journal said citing people familiar with the company’s plans.

According to the paper, two people who saw early prototypes described the device as slightly larger than Apple Inc’s iPod Touch, which is similar to the iPhone but does not have cellphone capabilities.

Another person who was briefed on the company’s plans told the paper that Dell may begin selling the device later this year, though this person said the plan could be delayed or scrapped entirely.

A Dell spokesman declined to comment to the paper on any plans for the product category.

Dell may use chips based on designed licensed from ARM Holdings PLC, people familiar with the company’s plans told the paper.

Dell could not be immediately reached for a comment by Reuters.