Amazon Tablet Built By Samsung Could Arrive By End Of Summer?
Speculation that Amazon may be pushing forth its own Android tablet continues full steam ahead and now there's belief that the tablet would be built by Samsung. That's an interesting choice, considering the Korean electronics company has been the main components supplier for Apple, with whom they are about to embark on a massive legal battle. This gets all the more spicy when you think that Amazon is poised as the best iPad 2 rival.
According to a report by Forrestor analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, an Amazon tablet would be the ultimate iPad 2 competitor because Amazon has the ability to compete on price subsidized by its content offering, and the ability to compete on distribution. And over the last few months, Amazon has indeed been quietly building up its arsenal to battle against Apple and the other tablet makers.
Amazon recently opened doors to its Amazon Appstore for Android apps, even scoring an exclusive deal with the popular Angry Birds Rio title. Modeling itself after Apple's Appstore, the Amazon Appstore aims to elevate itself above the Android Marketplace by providing a less spammy experience with a $99 charge to developers for listing and with a review and approval process.
But certainly Android apps are only a small portion of the content Amazon can now distribute to its own tablet. Amazon already has a popular e-books delivery platform for the Kindle (soon to add library e-book borrowing support), but also recently switched on a video streaming service for its Amazon Prime subscribers. And further add to that their Amazon Cloud Player streaming service announced late last month, which is an online digital media locker that can store and share music, video, documents, and photos.
They have quite a lot going for them and if it all pans out with Samsung, the tablet could be a good kick in Apple's arse and a mighty threat to all other Android tablet makers. Whether or not Amazon will go with a vanilla Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS is another question folks are pondering. Talks of tightening up the Android tablet OS has people thinking that Amazon could possibly attempt to develop its own platform. Although, developing its own interface layer atop of Android seems more likely—something similar to what HTC has done with their Sense 3.0 would be pretty awesome. Amazon has recently been hiring on Android developers, but have stayed mum on any such Android tablet developments.
However, could an Amazon tablet possibly arrive by end of Summer? That's what veteran tech editor Peter Rojas seems to think over at Gdgt. What are your thoughts about an Amazon tablet?
[via Business Insider]