Amazon readies its Kindle 2.0 announcement but may face competition from Google and the iPhone Looks like Amazon has a press conference scheduled for Monday, Feb. 9, in New York, and many are expecting the company to announce the long-awaited Kindle 2.0 e-book reader. I’ve heard reports that when Bezos looked at the software update last fall, he sent the Lab126 guys back to Cupertino to do some more work. But that’s just a rumor, and there could be any number of reasons that the shipment was pushed back. There was obviously plenty of demand for the Kindle, and Amazon was back-ordered through the holiday season.A couple of extra months on the software side could mean significant new features and possibly better performance on page rendering. But I suspect that the gating factor here is really the performance of the underlying e-ink technology. Still, it will be interesting to see what’s announced next week.[ Amazon’s Kindle may have revolutionized e-books, but when it Kindle 2.0 debuts, it’ll face competition; see how Stanza for the iPhone stacks up ] No doubt there’s going to be more competition in this space, and given the lackluster economy, buying luxury gadgets might not be at the top of everyone’s to-do list right now. Google’s also getting into e-books, promoting the ability to search its archive of 1.5 million books online from the iPhone and Android open source phones. And of course, there’s Stanza, an excellent e-book reader for the iPhone, as well as Sony’s stand-alone eReader. Open Source