Amazon to unveil 'Kindle tablet' this coming Wednesday
by Steven Mostyn - Sep 26 2011, 13:02
Pretender to the throne? Image: Amazon.
With the likes of Samsung, Motorola, ASUS and Acer all offering worthy tablet alternatives to the Apple iPad, is there room at the table left for another major manufacturing player? Evidently so.
More to the point, online retail giant Amazon will this week officially unveil its virgin foray into the tablet sector, if emerging online reports are to believed. The reports in question have sprung up after Amazon dispatched media invitations to a mystery press conference scheduled for Wednesday.
“Wednesday is tablet day,” BGC analyst Colin Gillis said in a Reuter report, before offering that Amazon’s upcoming device is likely to sport “a very aggressive price”.
Although Amazon isn’t perhaps a heavyweight when it comes to crafting its own consumer electronics, its market-leading Kindle eReader has certainly shown the retailer’s ambition and ability.
That being said, regardless of any aggressive pricing and Kindle sales momentum, Amazon has something of a mountain to climb if it hopes to rival the iPad’s pulling power—which presently stands at around 29 million unit sales.
Although Amazon has not yet revealed any concrete details regarding the ‘Kindle tablet’, industry insiders claim it will boast a 7.0-inch touch-screen display and run on Google’s Android operating system.
Current pricing speculation suggests Amazon’s tablet device will sell for an extremely tempting $250 USD, which will include membership to its Amazon Prime service (worth $79 USD per year).
If accurate, that price tag (effectively $171 USD for the hardware) is a massive drop when compared to the iPad’s starting price of $500 USD.
In closing, the folk over at Forrester project that Amazon’s device is on track to “completely disrupt the status quo” where tablets are concerned. They also fancy the Kindle tablet could shift up to five million units by the turn of 2012.
Roll on Wednesday.
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