Digitimes: Amazon Tablet to Be Made By Quanta

Rumors of Amazon’s plan for a tablet hit late in April, via GDGT’s Peter Rojas, and now the latest scuttlebutt is repeating the Engadget founder’s claims.

Last month, Peter Rojas made a big splash when he announced to the tech world that Amazon was planning a tablet offering. Speaking via a post on his two-year-old gadget-centric social networking site, GDGT, Rojas claimed that the tablet would be an Android device and would launch this summer. Rojas said he was "99 percent certain" Amazon has contracted Samsung to manufacture its tablet.

Now, Digitimes has come forward with its own Amazon tablet news and claims Quanta has just received the work order. Already the manufacturer of RIM’s PlayBook and reportedly building tablets for Sony, the Amazon order will apparently contribute more than $3.5 billion to Quanta’s 2011 revenues. Shipping is said to be starting in the second half of this year, with peak production season yielding approximately 700,000 - 800,000 units per month.

The Digitimes report goes on to say that Amazon will reduce the price of its Kindle to make it more attractive to consumers and the education industry while the company’s tablet will, of course, be pushed as an iPad 2 competitor.

Last month Rojas predicted Amazon would use Android as a base to build a totally new OS that tightly integrates Amazon services, such as the company’s App Store, Cloud Drive storage service, MP3 store and instant video offerings. Digitimes sources offered no information on the software aspects of this device.