It's been an ongoing rumour even in late 2010, certainly since the Amazon Appstore opened its door in March, but now TechCrunch has broken details about the e-tailer's first proper tablet.

Operating under the Kindle brand, the 7-inch multi-touch tablet is said to be similar in size and look to RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook, but running on a single core processor, with 6 GB of memory, and using a custom version of Android 2.2.

This means the user interface and experience will be completely different to other Android devices, being more like a Kindle e-reader in that you can name it etc.

Priced to sell

The most significant news however is the price - $250 - which will make it similar to Barnes & Noble's rival Nook Color, and half the price of the cheapest iPad.

As we've seen with rival tablets such as the Xoom and TouchPad, customers will buy non-Apple tablets, but only if they are significantly cheaper.

The Kindle tablet planned for release in November, with rumours that a more expensive 10-inch device could be rolled out in early 2012, if it's successful.

Prior to the release of this information, the rumours of sub-$300 price had analysts Forrester predicting sales of 3-5 million units in its first three months. 

Subsidised by services

Of course, Amazon is going to be heavily marketing the device, which will also be fully integrated with its services, including the main Amazon website and the Amazon Appstore. Google's Android Market won't be included though, it's suggested.

Other services will include the Kindle reader, and Amazon's cloud-based music and video players.

It's thought that at launch, the device will be wi-fi only with 3G versions rolled out later.

Of course, at Pocket Gamer what we're really interested in is whether it will be any good for gaming.

Considering the relatively low technical specifications and custom OS, it seems unlikely it will be designed to handle high quality 3D games, but no doubt there will be versions of titles such as Angry Birds, Bejeweled and Ville-style freemium games.

[source: TechCrunch]