rumors

In what is another indication of a rumored Amazon tablet, Taiwanese trade publication, DigiTimes, this morning quoted sources from the supply chain who said Amazon has become the second largest buyer of tablet parts as component suppliers are lining up to provide parts for Amazon’s seven- and ten-inch slates. That’s a notable change from previous reports asserting Apple had gobbled up pretty much the entire supply of tablet parts. The Amazon devices are apparently due for a fourth quarter launch and the online retail giant is targeting to ship four million tablet PCs this year.

The publication named suppliers which include an unnamed processor from Nvidia, gravity sensors from Sitronix and touch panels from Wintek (also an Apple supplier) in addition to J Touch and Chunghwa Picture Tubes. Note that the mention of the seven-inch Amazon tablet probably means a new Kindle e-reader while the ten-incher most likely refers to a brand new Android-powered tablet said to be integrated with their cloud stores carrying mobile apps, music, movies, e-books and other digital warez. A Retrevo survey indicated that 79 percent of buyers would consider an Amazon tablet if priced less than $250. Apple is said to be considering cheaper components for next iPad amid the increasing pricing pressure in the market.

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Taiwanese trade publication DigiTimes quotes unnamed industry sources who claim Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer for gadgets, will produce a rumored Android-driven tablet from Amazon, said to sport a 10.1-inch display, with shipments to begin in 2012 at the earnest. Quanta Computer, another contract manufacturer from Asia, has already begun shipping a smaller seven-inch device to Amazon, the report notes:

Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) has reportedly landed orders for 10.1-inch tablet PCs from Amazon with shipments to begin in 2012, while Quanta Computer has begun shipping a 7-inch model to Amazon. Foxconn declined to comment on market speculation.

Foxconn of course is Apple’s long-time manufacturer so it comes as a surprise that Apple did not exercise its influence and billions to block rivals from tapping Foxconn’s manufacturing potentials. That’s not entirely unheard of, however…

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Sony’s inaugural Android tablet, the S1, was caught in the wild ten days ago and today Sony gets semi-official with a possible pre-order date for the UK set to Thursday, September 1, This is my next has learned.

We’ve just seen documents indicating that Sony Centre stores in the UK will be taking S1 pre-orders starting September 1st. That’s just a little later than the late-August pre-order date we’d previously heard, but nothing too major – and Sony will still be among the first to ship a themed and skinned Honeycomb tablet, which we suppose is something of an accomplishment.

No pricing information was released at press time. The Japanese consumer electronics giant will apparently work closely with the preferred retailers to educate them about the benefits of the S1. The September 1 launch is just a month and half away and we are expecting the S1 to hit the US shores shortly thereafter.

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Uh-oh, looks like Amazon is serious about getting on board the Android cluetrain. In fact, they most likely want a piece of the action in the Android space themselves. A tipster told AndroidMe that the online retail giant is planning an “entire family” of Android gadgets for this holiday shopping season.

This tip came from an industry insider with direct knowledge of the project. The information was shared with me in a recent face-to-face meeting and I believe the source to be trustworthy. It was also confirmed by a separate source who has provided reliable information in the past. As with most of my tipsters, they wish to remain anonymous.

Author Taylor Wimberly goes on to lay out the many reasons explaining Amazon’s motivation to compete in this crowded space. He’s got the point and here are just a few…

Update: BGR says:

we have been told that the “entry” level tablet, codenamed “Coyote” will be based on the NVIDIA Tegra 2 platform. The big boy? That’s codenamed “Hollywood” and will be based on the NVIDIA T30 “Kal-El” which will bring a screaming quad-core processor with a 500% performance increase over the dual-core Tegra 2.

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As first Chrome OS notebooks are about to hit the market, specs leak to the web pertaining to Chrome OS machines from Samsung and Acer plus a mysterious touch device. As expected, these forthcoming machines ditch hard drives in favor of presumably scarce solid state storage because pretty much everything sans the operating system code resides in the cloud.

Engadget detailed Samsung’s machine code-named “Alex” which is rumored to pack in a ten-inch display at 1280-by-800 pixel resolution, a Synaptics touchpad, a webcam, Bluetooth and a Qualcomm Gobi 2000 3G cellular connectivity. The outed processor is said to be of a 1.5GHz dual-core Atom N550 variety. Two gigabytes of RAM and a SanDisk solid state drive of unknown capacity were also spotted.

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