Rumored: Amazon Kindle Tablet Will Arrive In Time For The Holidays
May 3, 2011 12:48 PM EDT by K. T. Bradford 
Rumblings of a Kindle tablet have been around for several years, but the mill started grinding away faster than ever this morning based on this post from Digitimes, the world leader in rumors about stuff from unnamed sources in Asia. The report states that Quanta, an OEM company, received orders from Amazon to begin building this new Kindle tablet. There aren’t many hardware details, but the display is said to come from Taiwan-based E Ink Holdings. That doesn’t mean the display itself will be eInk, but a touch-enabled LCD with Fringe Field Switching technology, which should make text crisp and cut down on glare. It’s similar to (but more advanced than) the display on the Nook Color. According to the unnamed source, the device will be ready by the latter half of the year, which indicates a big holiday push.
All of this is unconfirmed, of course. That never stops anyone from speculating, though. So I’ll engage in some.
Since Amazon has already co-opted some of Barnes & Noble’s better ideas, such as eBook lending, they’ll probably copy the format of the Nook Color as well. So it will be a 7-inch tablet that’s not full-featured like a Galaxy Tab, but still good enough for eReader lovers. It will run Honeycomb Android, though users will only be able to buy from the Amazon App Store, not the Android Market. This won’t be so bad since Amazon’s selection is pretty large. In conjunction with the tablet’s release, we’ll also find out that Amazon has been building up a library of color magazines that look absolutely great on it. And graphic novels, too.
Like the Nook Color, it will be able to play music. But Amazon’s offering will hook up with their cloud player service, allowing users to stream music to the tablet while they read their favorite books. It will be Wi-Fi only to start, but later next year they’ll announce carrier partnerships. The free 3G ride will probably be over, but by then someone will have universal data plans that work across multiple devices.
This is all just speculation, of course. What are your predictions, wishes, and outright fanciful ideas about the Amazon Kindle tablet?
May 3rd, 2011 at 2:43 pm
I think they should skip Tegra 2 (since it’s so late in the development cycle) and go straight to Kal-El (Tegra 3). After all Nvidia have hinted that we should start to see tablet models based on it this year (August) so it would tie up with that time frame. If they can produce something with a less glossy and more readable screen outdoors then it will have some differentiation with the numerous other honeycomb based tablets. It depends a bit on how they choose to position it; is it Kindle V3 (that is with the emphasis on book reading) or Kindle Tablet V1 with more emphasis on being more of a general purpose tablet.