Oh, we love nothing more than a good juicy rumor around Mac|Life. We were devoted followers of every single tidbit in the run up to the release of the iPad and beyond. Now it looks like there could be another tablet in the running to be the iPad Killah, if these rumors about Amazon can be credited.
Techcrunch has a tipster who's been good to them in the past. This person dropped the news that Amazon was on the verge of releasing an Android-based app store. And days later, guess what? Confirmation, inlcuding many details that the tipster provided.
But the notion of an Android-based app store seemed rather peculiar without an Android-based device on which to run those apps, no?
Well, now they tell us that the tipster put another interesting bit of news out into the waters, that Amazon is in fact hard at work on a tablet of some form that will presumably run Android. This, of course, makes total sense for the app store to work. Rumors have abounded that Amazon has a variety of hardware projects in the works at their labs, but the tablet makes the most sense. They have to have seen the writing on the wall for the Kindle as a device in its current incarnation. While there are some devotees to its "off-the-grid" lack of functionality, most people are looking for convergence in their tech gear.
An Amazon DRM-locked Android-based tablet with Kindle built in? The Kindle app for the iPad already has the ability to run media content, so the next step seems pretty obvious. Amazon is sitting on a huge catalog of digital content that remains shackled to the desktop or laptop apart from just their ebooks which have been boomin. Apps and the ability to directly download Amazon store mp3s as well as movie downloads makes perfect sense and is certainly a good strategy in the face of the iTunes juggernaut.
