Amazon Fire tablets have so far been cheap and cheerful devices, often bought for children. Running a heavily-customized version of Android known as Fire OS, they haven’t achieved much traction in the market …
The company is now hoping to change all that with a new tablet aiming to compete in the same premium market as the base model iPad.
Reuters doesn’t have many details, but says that it will run a more standard version of Android and will cost around $400.
As part of a project known internally as Kittyhawk, Amazon plans to release a higher-end tablet as soon as next year offering the Android operating system software for the first time, according to six people familiar with the matter. Since the Fire tablet’s introduction in 2011, Amazon has used what is known as a “forked” version of Android with custom modifications that make it work like a unique operating system.
That would represent a pretty ambitious leap in the company’s tablet ambitions.
The company will presumably be hoping for better luck than it had with the short-lived Fire Phone, that launched in the summer of 2014 and was discontinued a year later.
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A Huawei tablet shown purely as an example: photo by Andrey Matveev on Unsplash