Peter Rojas, the former Editor of Engadget who left the AOL owned technology blog to star GDGT, is saying that Amazon is working on a tablet that will come out this summer. He says that he’s pretty sure it’s built by Samsung, and that there’s a strong chance that it isn’t going to run Android 3.0 Honeycomb, but instead an earlier version of Android that Amazon will give a significant overhaul to in order to provide a tight (read: limited) user experience. Considering the digital goods Amazon sells, from videos, to music, and let’s not forget the massive electronic book empire that the Kindle brought, they’re is in a good position to offer something that’ll serve as a continuous revenue generator from loyal customers. If Amazon sells this rumored tablet for less than $300, as Peter is suggesting, then recoup any losses they have on hardware by selling content, they can alter the current tablet landscape which, let’s be honest to ourselves, is dominated by Apple.
All we want to know is what’s Amazon going to do to make their tablet, again assuming it’s real, more compelling than the iPad? Apple’s tablet has a brilliant web browser, you can load it up with the Amazon Kindle app or purchase books from iBooks, and iTunes provides a rich library of content, so the only real way Amazon can compete with Cupertino is to offer a different business model. Amazon currently offers a service called Amazon Prime that runs about $80/year and gives customers free 2 day shipping, but also unlimited video streaming of over 5,000 movies and television shows. That’s a much better customer proposition than pay per film, pay per episode.
We’ll hopefully find out more by the time beach weather rolls around, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see such a tablet emerge for the holiday 2011 season.