It’s been fairly obvious for a while that Amazon is planning to release a fully-fledged tablet. Having already got their hardware feet well and truly wet with the Kindle, the online retail giant has been slowly putting the building blocks in place for their own tablet ecosystem built atop Android. Now rumours are beginning to circle that they have tapped giant OEM Quanta to build the device, to be released later this year.
A few weeks ago we saw the launch of the Amazon Appstore, an iTunes-style curated app outlet for Android, and shortly afterwards the surprise launch of Amazon Cloud Player, a music locker much like the Google Music service being built for Android. With their Kindle eBooks platforms already very much established, Amazon has already covered many of the bases required to be competitive in the tablet market – and more than that, are already ahead of the competition on some.
Kindle is the de facto standard in eBook publishing and distribution, with competitors such as Apple’s iBooks, Google Books and Barnes & Noble’s Nook barely a blip on the radar. Amazon’s music service is one of the largest players outside the Apple ecosystem, so much so that Google installed their app on early Android devices to address the lack of an iTunes-style music store. Let’s not forget Amazon have a not-insignificant video streaming business too, which would doubtlessly appear on any own-brand tablet offering.
The current rumours point to Taiwan-based manufacturing giant Quanta producing the unknown-sized device. The tablet will sport Fringe Field Switching screen technology which, aside from offering a humorous acronym, will give a visual experience similar to the IPS displays used in the iPad.
On the face of it, Amazon has put together an offering to potentially rival Apple’s ecosystem in terms of available content and consolidation. If they can pull off the hardware side of things, we could be looking at yet another credible entrant into the rapidly-crowding tablet market – although we can’t imagine Google will be particularly happy about a company competing with them so heavily while using their own OS.
