Super-tablet
Mobile blog BGR cites an anonymous tipster as confirmation that Amazon is working on not one but two tablets, due to be launched before the end of the year.
An entry-level tablet - codenamed Coyote - will run NVIDIA's Tegra 2, but the main event will be codenamed Hollywood, and will run NVIDIA's upcoming quad-core chip, codenamed Kal-El, according to the tipster.
That's about it as far as the BGR leak goes, but we find the timing a tad curious, coming as it has on the back of a big PR drive from NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.
Huang had made it clear during NVIDIA's quarterly earnings analyst call that he doesn't think Honeycomb tablets have been well positioned. He clearly didn't feel this view had been sufficiently widely reported so he gave an interview to Cnet in which he blamed poor execution from retail, lack of apps and over-pricing of tablets like the Motorola Xoom for the fact that Apple continues to dominate the tablet market.
But as ZDNet pointed out subsequently, it's not like the Tegra 2 chip is exactly taking the Apple A5 to the cleaners either - a fact we know is causing considerable concern internally at NVIDIA.
Huang had softened his tone somewhat by the time he spoke at the Reuters Technology Summit, predicting Android tablets would eventually out-sell Apple ones. "The Android phone took only two and a half years to achieve the momentum that we're talking about. I would expect the same thing on Honeycomb tablets," he said. Huang also revealed that Kal-El already has at least ten design wins.
NVIDIA's shares took a bit of a kicking at the end of last week, and the slide continued yesterday, with part of the reason being concerns about the sales of Honeycomb tablets, which predominantly run Tegra 2 chips. Huang has always been very hands-on when it comes to spreading the NVIDIA word and he seems to be trying to convince the market things are still very much on track for Tegra. We wouldn't be surprised if this Amazon leak was part of that drive.
As for the rumour itself, Amazon has been expected to enter the tablet market for a while now, but the only good reason it would have for doing so, surely, would be to protect its e-book business. The main reason Amazon got into the mobile device market at all was to catalyse the e-book market, and if it thinks people are more likely to read books on a fully functional tablet than on a Kindle it may feel the need to participate in the tablet market.
But even if it's the first tablet to run a quad-core SoC, it's hard to see how an Amazon tablet can differentiate itself from the rest, and Amazon might be better advised to focus instead on ensuring the Kindle provides a superior reading experience to any tablet.
UPDATE - 11:40, 17 May 2011 - TechCrunch has a good analysis of why it would be in Amazon's interests to launch its own Android devices - namely its own app store.
