Amazon tablet coming this year?

Is there any hardware manufacturer out there that isn’t developing or releasing a tablet this year? Seems that almost everyone is releasing their version of what they hope will be the next big thing in the tablet market. Apple are light years ahead with their iPad at the moment leaving all the others very much out in the cold.

So enter Amazon. Amazon have already had some success with several flavours of their eBook reader, the Kindle so are arguable in a good place to develop their own answer to the iPad. Amazon certainly have the exposure and the branding to pull it off. The clever money suggests that Amazon will have their tablet ready for the end of Q3 or beginning of Q4 of this year to ensure that they maximise the Christmas sales.

Amazon themselves have been extremely tight lipped about the possible Tablet so there is certainly nothing close to concrete when it comes to specification but I’m guessing it will be Android based. In any case I’m sure that Amazon will have been watching and learning from all the other tablets on the market, each one has come with its own share of problems and mistakes and perhaps the most important lesson is simplicity. My daughter could use an iPad from age 2 so if a 2 year old can use it the UI must be beyond intuitive, it must be innate. If Amazon, or anyone for that matter, can come up with a UI that can rival the iPad then maybe they have half a chance.

There is one other thing that Amazon could do to make an impact and that would be to use their whisper sync technology on a tablet. Imagine buying a tablet with built in 3G connectivity and never having to pay a subscription just as with the 3G Kindle. Perhaps unlikely for now but maybe it’s coming!?

As always we’ll be watching closely and will return with updates as we get them.

Posted by: Matt