Amazon's Android powered tablet arrives in October

We have been hearing about the Amazon tablet rumors since it surfaced sometime around May. The rumors indicated a Taiwanese notebook maker, Quanta Computer to have received the orders from Amazon to work on the development of the tablets. While no other specifications regarding the screen size, memory and processor were revealed, the news created enough excitement and buzz among the tech blogs around the world.

The recent news from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) indicates that the Android tablet will be seen sporting a nine-inch screen and will run on Google's Android platform - though their is still debate on the OS, whether it will be a Honeycomb or gingerbread. However the interesting bit of news was that unlike its rival iPad, the tablet will not be equipped with any camera.

According to WSJ, while the pricing and distribution of the device is unclear, the online retailer won't design the initial tablet itself."  Apparently the company will be working on another model which will be released next year sporting an inhouse-design. This ties in well with the earlier news reported by BGR which had indicated that there will be two tablets -  codenamed "Coyote" and "Hollywood."

Coyote will be a cheaper tablet powered by NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, while the Hollywood tablet will be almighty powerful and come equipped with a quad-core NVIDIA processor. The introduction of Amazon tablet may pose a challenge for Amazon's Kindle. Whether people will opt for both the tablet and the kindle or just opt for the tablet, may cannibalize the sales of Kindle.

Amazon tablet will be a strong contender against rival Apple. Both the companies have battled over digital books, music and mobile applications in the past and now will be competing once again in the tablet market.

According to analysts, Amazon's decision to launch a tablet will sync in well with its digital retail business and make it a strong contender against Apple's iPad 2 and the iTunes universe. Seeing the slew of tablets bombarding the consumers, we are quite certain that Amazon will pack in quite a few goodies to lure tablet lovers and beat competition.

Apart from providing the one stop shop to the largest library of music, movies and television rentals, we hear that the company is also planning to offer one free paid app everyday and Cloud Locker music streaming and movie streaming service for free. It is also speculated that the tablet will tie in apps like Gmail or Google Voice and offer MP3 store, Cloud Drive, cloud storage network drive, Kindle Store, Instant video recording and many other features.

Apart from Apple, Amazon tablet will also see competition from Sony who recently unveiled its S1 and S2 tablets. While Sony S1 is said to be the first of the reskinned Android Honeycomb tablet, Sony S2 is first of its kind clamshell tablet with dual displays.