The buzz around the Kindle is more about Apple than about Amazon.

I went to a press conference Monday morning with hundreds of slobbering tech journalists for a buzzy product announcement. For weeks, the blogosphere had been hashing through rumors and leaked screenshots of what this next device might look like, what its feature set might be, and what it might mean for its parent company’s overall business model. The CEO unveiling the gadget was wearing jeans and delivered a lofty, off-the-cuff speech to hype the audience about the new device. The product’s parent company is coming off impressive profit numbers last quarter, despite a downturn among its competitors. Once the gadget was unveiled, the press reviewed it favorably, despite only minor improvements, almost as though they were trying to will it to success.

If I had told you all this a year ago, you would have thought I'd gone to an Apple event. And on Monday morning, there were times when I could have sworn I was hanging out with Apple. But I wasn’t. I was with Amazon, at its press conference announcing the Kindle 2.

Watch a TBM video dispatch from the press conference below.

The new Kindle does the same thing its ancestor did—display electronic books and other text. You download books from Amazon’s store, and they’re delivered wirelessly to your Kindle. Amazon takes a cut of sales from the device and the e-book, creating a new revenue source for the company. Don’t be ashamed if you didn’t know all this already; you’re probably one of the 299.5 million people in this country who doesn’t own a Kindle.

Some tech-porn measurements we should dispense up front: The new Kindle is 0.36 inches thin, about 50 percent the thickness of its obese 0.7 inch predecessor. Aiming for nuance, the device can now show 16 stunning shades of gray rather than just four. It is 10.2 ounces light and can read books aloud in that sing-songy robot voice we all love so much. Finally, it has a 2 gigabyte hard drive, good for storing 1,500 books. We’ll dub this the Michiko Kakutani feature, because who besides the New York Times book critic needs a digitized library in her purse?

I lather on the snark not because I don’t like the Kindle—it’s a very cool and impressive device. I’m overly critical because nobody else seems willing to be.

Tech blogs were predictably breathless for the event. Gizmodo, Engadget, and Silicon Alley Insider gave it the live-blog treatment usually reserved for an Apple event. CrunchGear made a noble attempt to burst the Kindle’s bubble by uploading a video showing the new Kindle doesn’t actually turn its pages faster than the old version, as Amazon claimed. But the post was quickly amended by a CrunchGear editor with the note that the original author was “a little harsh,” and that it was unfair for speed conclusions to be reached from unscientific tests.