The rumor's of the impending release of Amazon's tablet have been all over the Internet lately. The story is that this tablet will be very nice but will absolutely beat a certain price point and bring tablets to the masses. HP eat your heart out! Now one has been seen and touched in the wild by TechCrunch's MG Siegler and what he is reporting is very interesting to say the least.
The Amazon tablet he handled will come in a 7" size which looks to do battle with the upcoming Nook Color 2. The 7" will be released and if it is successful they have a 10" version ready to follow. The tablet is very similar in form to the Blackberry Playbook and will feature a multitouch screen and no capacitive buttons. The tablet will be running Android, only it will not be the tablet Android we know and love. It will be a heavily skinned version of Android prior to 2.2 and will not receive updates to Gingerbread or even Honeycomb. It seems Amazon is taking open source literally and is not working with Google at all on this tablet. There is no Android market app since Amazon is using its own app store in place of this( However my question is how will all the apps made to run on 2.2+ perform?) The tablet will also seamlessly integrate all sorts of Amazon features such as music on the Amazon Cloud Player, books on Kindle and movies on Amazon Instant Video. The OS is thickly skinned and like the Nook Color doesn't feel much like Android at all, which might not be a bad thing the only question is how user friendly it is. Updates to the OS will come directly from Amazon and will not have anything to do with Google.
MG Seigler thinks that the tablet will have a single core processor and 6GB of internal storage. This looks to be a very interesting experiment for the consumer. We have seen the Nook which is also running Android become pretty popular as a somewhat tablet replacement when ported to run the Android app store. Now Amazon is going to bring us a tablet at a $250 price point that will not look like any Android tablet we know. It will not update when Google tablets do and it will not feature the Market we know and love. It will however be supported by one of the biggest sources of Media out there and seamlessly integrate Amazon music and movies and come with a free upgrade to Amazon Prime. What do you guys think, will it be worth the risk? Sound off in the comments and let us know!!
JKeene AndroREV Writer
We Are AndroREV, WE ARE!!!!
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