Amazon Cloud Journal

Reports of an Android tablet coming from Amazon this fall have graduated from DigiTimes to the Wall Street Journal, which heard that Amazon would put out a nine-inch camera-less iPad rival before October.

Apparently Amazon has outsourced both the widget's design and manufacturing to some Asian ODM. And apparently that's to get into the market now. It's reportedly designing another one itself but that won't be ready until next year.

The key is supposed to be in the pricing where the merchant prince is supposed to have no leverage unless the dingus sells at a loss.

Users can watch videos, read e-books and listen to digital music they buy or rent from Amazon, which is supposed to aggravate Apple to no end, the paper said.

TechCrunch figures Amazon's one hope would be to pre-install its Appstore and its other stores on the thing. "When that happens," it says, "Amazon will have an Android tablet that is more compelling than any other Android tablet on the market on day one."

The blog also reckons that "It could be the first major player to use Android that Google has absolutely no control over." It thinks Google has more to worry about than Apple. It says, "If I were Microsoft, I'd go all-in when negotiating with my Seattle technology neighbor to get a Bing search deal done for this new tablet."

Anyway, Amazon is also supposed to release two new Kindles. One will have a touchscreen. The other will be cheaper than the current Kindle, which now only costs $139 with 3G Internet access and ads sponsored by AT&T. The ad-free version still costs $189.