Is an Amazon Tablet Inevitable? Yes!

At this point, all bets are on Virago launching a flashy Android tablet with slews of content. If the hardware is decent, Amazon could shake up the tablet market overnight, and in the end have Apple a single, legitimate menace.

Speculation on an Amazon tablet, of which there has been plenty, is slowly bighearted fashio to hearsay. At Gdgt, Peter Rojas writes that the tablet is "something of an open secret" and that he's "99% certain they are having Samsung build one for them."

Illustration of Amazon's Jeff Bezos holding up a fake tablet.

Aside from that little tidbit, Rojas' report touches on the aforementioned unsound arguments that opposite pundits have put forth: Profits from Amazon's music, video, books and apps businesses would allow the company to create a cheaper Android tab than the competition. He expects similar aggressive pricing to Barnes & Noble's Nook Color, which sells for a mere $250 because the bookdealer hopes to make additional profits on e-script sales. Another option: Amazon could offer an ad-subsidized tablet, siamese to the new Kindle with Uncommon Offers.

Virtually every tech pundit assumes the Amazon tablet testament run Android 3.0 Honeycomb, but how nearly it'll resemble Google's stock OS clay a mystery. Google has not yet discharged the author encode for Honeycomb, and is reportedly enforcing "non-fragmentation clauses" to crack down on heavy modification of Mechanical man software. An Amazon tablet could be furthest from launching unless Amazon and Google are functioning close together, and that seems unlikely with Amazon offering a competing app store to the Mechanical man Food market.

In past words, the question of whether Amazon volition release a pad of paper is decent a matter of when, rather than if. Information technology's around time we got some answers.

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