Amazon prepares a new tablet with a forked version of Android

Amazon has revealed their plans for a new Android tablet device. It seems that this “Kindle” tablet could be the first serious iPad competitor. One of the best moves Amazon will try out is the pricing of this new tablet. According to Tech Crunch, the price should be $250 for a 7” tablet. So far iPad competitors have tried to follow the prices setup by Apple but the demand by customers was very low.

This new tablets looks a bit like RIM’s PlayBook and it comes with a capacitive touch display. Apparently it will be powered by an single core processor, but there will soon be an 10” tablet following and it will probably have dual core processor inside. Currently the device will come only with Wi-fi connection although Amazon is negotiating with network carriers for including the 3G connectivity. This tablet will come with 6 Gigabyte of memory space, which is one of the reasons Amazon can offer such affordable prices. It should also have a slot for SD memory cards so it could make better uses of its multimedia capacities, as 6GB is good for storing books, but for multimedia it isn’t really enough.

No camera is available and there are no external buttons. The first launch of this new device is planned for November but the more interesting device with larger screen should be launched during the next year.

What is especially interesting is that Amazon is forking the Android and customising it for their own needs. So there wont be a Google backed Marketplace or other familiar apps available. Amazon will provide their own services and all software updates will come from Amazon exclusively. Amazon is obviously trying to exclude Google from the whole process. It will be interesting to see how will Google respond to this. Somehow we are sure this isn’t something they would like to see developing. So they response will probably be quite interesting.

Anyway given the incredible rush for cheap HP TouchPad tablets we witnessed last month, there is a good chance for this to become a great success for Amazon.

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