14 DAY TRIAL // Not that it should be much of a surprise for anyone, but there are new details on Amazon's rumored tablet, coming this fall, by October. The device will have a nine inch screen and has been outsourced completely to an Asian manufacturer.
At the same time, Amazon is also working on two Kindle devices, one with a touchscreen, which is slowly becoming standard for ereaders, and one without.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon has outsourced both the design and the manufacturing of its first tablet device to an unknown company. This will mean that Amazon will mostly have a say on software alone.
Of course, it's the software that Amazon is most interested in, the only reason it wants a tablet is to have a device to deliver movies, music, books, more recently apps and everything else that it sells in front of consumers.
The device itself probably won't be that impressive, it is said to have a nine inch screen, compared to the iPad's 9.7 inch.
It won't have a camera and Amazon is said to be looking to make it as cheap as possible, so it likely won't be competing with the iPad in terms of build quality or design.
Amazon's tablet will be running an unknown version of Android, likely Honeycomb since Ice Cream Sandwich won't be available by then.
The company is also working on another tablet, that it's designing itself, but that won't come out until next year.
With an Android tablet under its belt, Amazon will be able to leverage its new app store, its cloud player and MP3 store and, of course, the Kindle ebook store.
Add to this the video streaming service, and you have a large number of ways in which Amazon will be able to make money from the device, rather than the hardware itself.
At the same time, the new tablet is a big threat to Google since it will be able to completely ditch everything Google-related from it and replace it with Amazon-sourced components, the Android Market with the Amazon Appstore, the music player with Amazon's Cloud Player app and so on.