Nice old thread, I used this to buy my Kindle when I was in the US.

An update on the status of Kindle 2 now: The price is now USD $259 (RM825 as of today), with international 3G wireless. They ship internationally but not to Malaysia or Singapore yet If you have friends in other countries, you can ask them to buy it for you  Check whether it's available in a particular country here.

More importantly, with Firmware 2.0 (released last year), it can open PDF files, but no pan/zoom yet (coming soon in Firmware v2.5!). Orientation of the page can be changed manually, so opening a PDF in landscape mode helps to enlarge the text and images.

Kindle Firmware v2.5 is supposed to come out this late May, and will include PDF pan and zoom. Another nice feature is collections. Now is a happy time to be a Kindle user Too bad annotation for PDF's are still missing. Oh well, you can't have everything in life 

I also used the Unicode Font Hack to enable reading in Chinese/Japanese. The Mobile Read forum is a nice place to check out ebook readers in general, and there is a subforum on Amazon Kindles.

For firmware v2.0, Amazon sent me a notification email with a link to download the update file. I then connected my Kindle to the computer via USB to update it manually (instructions were given by Amazon).

Note that if you've done any hacks you have to uninstall the hacks first before you can update.
Now waiting for v2.5