Amazon's rumored tablet has been the subject of speculation for months and now TechCrunch says it has seen the device. The site reported Friday that it has a 7-inch capacitive touch screen, will sell for $250, and won't be getting a fancy new name, but instead will be called an Amazon Kindle, just like the online retailer's existing line of Kindle ereaders.
TechCrunch's MG Siegler reported Friday that he had got his hands on one of the Design Verification Testing (DVT) version of Amazon's tablet that "have started floating around the company," and that a test drive convinced him "it's going to be a big deal."
Here's a breakdown of what TechCrunch's MG Siegler says about the purported Amazon tablet (he claimed he couldn't publish pictures as a condition imposed by his unnamed source):
- It looks a lot like Research in Motion's BlackBerry PlayBook and has a similar, rubbery backing.
- It's got no physical buttons other than the power button, no camera, possibly 6GB of disk space, and most likely runs on a single-core processor.
- It works via two-finger multi-touch, unlike Apple's iPad, which uses 10-finger multi-touch.
- It's full-color and back-lit like a tablet, rather than using e-ink like an ereader.
- It's going to be Wi-Fi-only at launch, though later versions may have 3G connectivity.
- "The interface is all Amazon and Kindle. It's black, dark blue, and a bunch of orange. The main screen is a carousel that looks like Cover Flow in iTunes which displays all the content you have on the device. This includes books, apps, movies, etc. Below the main carousel is a dock to pin your favorite items in one easy-to-access place. When you turn the device horizontally, the dock disappears below the fold."
- It runs a Kindle operating system that's built on top of Google's Android OS (Siegler guesses a version earlier than Android 2.2), but doesn't have much else to do with Android—writes Siegler: "[N]o Google app is anywhere to be found" on the tablet, and "They are not working with Google on this. At all."
- Amazon has apparently designed the rumored tablet as a vehicle for ferrying users to its services: "Amazon's content store is always just one click away. The book reader is a Kindle app (which looks similar to how it does on Android and iOS now). The music player is Amazon's Cloud Player. The movie player is Amazon's Instant Video player. The app store is Amazon's Android Appstore."
- Amazon tablet buyers get a free subscription to the Amazon Prime service, which normally costs $79 a year.
- It's going to be released at the end of November. If the 7-inch tablet is successful, Amazon plans to roll out a 10-inch tablet in the first quarter of 2012.
- The tablet will "co-exist" with Amazon's current lineup of e-ink-based ereaders.
- Amazon is also working on a "multi-touch screen/e-ink hybrid tablet device" but it's "nowhere near completion."
Source:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392403,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05039TX1K0000760
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