Amazon preparing its own tablet

According to a source, Amazon may be preparing to launch its own tablet. Taiwan's tech newspaper DigiTimes, claims that Amazon has placed orders for the device with Quanta Computer, the Taiwanese manufacturer supposedly tapped to crank out the tablets.

Quanta estimated that production of the forthcoming Amazon tablets would peak at 700,000 to 800,000 units a month and that the devices would begin shipping in the second half of 2011. The report also indicated that Amazon would be working with the company behind the Kindle's E Ink display, suggesting that a colorful screen readable in bright light could be in the cards.

While news that trickles out from Asian component product lines isn't historically the most reliable, these aren't the first murmurings of a tablet from the web retail giant. Amazon may be a name synonymous with online shopping, but it's also an aggressively innovative company that already has a gadget success story with its own e-reader, the Kindle.

The retailer has been expanding its horizons as of late and it appears that Amazon wants to get a foot in every door, from storage in the cloud with Amazon Cloud Drive to its own Android app store. Readying an Amazon-branded tablet would mean one more experiment, this time in the white-hot tablet market.

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