It's been a source of great speculation for months but today TechCrunch claims that it has actually seen and used the long anticipated tablet device that's coming soon from Amazon. The article doesn't show any pictures or video of the tablet, which it claims will simply be called the Amazon Kindle. The site says that the tablet's physical design looks much like RIM's Blackberry Playbook.
It looks like Amazon will sell this product as the next evolution of its popular Kindle eReader. However instead of an e-Ink screen, this will be an Android-based tablet with a 7 inch capacitive touch screen. The article says that instead of the normal Android user interface, Amazon has created its own UI for the tablet. It states, "The main screen is a carousel that looks like Cover Flow in iTunes which displays all the content you have on the device. This includes books, apps, movies, etc."
The tablet is also designed to link up to Amazon's many online services. The article states, "The book reader is a Kindle app (which looks similar to how it does on Android and iOS now). The music player is Amazon’s Cloud Player. The movie player is Amazon’s Instant Video player. The app store is Amazon’s Android Appstore." Some of the tech specs have yet to be confirmed but TechCrunch believes the tablet is running on a single core processor and may (or may not) have just 6 GB of storage. It will only have a WiFi wireless connection at launch but future versions might have 3G wireless support as well.
As far as the price, the Amazon Kindle will be sold for $250. That will include a free subscription to Amazon Prime which gives its users free two-day shipments on Amazon's retail web site as well as access to its streaming video service. Amazon is currently targeting a November launch of the Kindle tablet.
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