Amazon developing a Kindle for Android?

Amazon is looking for developers with Android experience; is the company creating a new tablet?

The Web has been crawling with rumors of an Android-based Kindle on Amazon's horizon since reports emerged in the last week to suggest that Amazon is developing a Kindle that will be capable of running on the Android OS. Recently, the company posted five new jobs on the Lab 126 website (which makes the Kindle) for developers with Android experience. 

The rumors are surfacing just one week after Forrester released a report arguing that Amazon is the only company that could realistically provide any kind of competition to Apple in the tablet market. Miscalculations in pricing and distribution make for a shaky future for most other tablets, such as the Motorola Xoom and tablets from HP and RIM, but Amazon is the one company that has the brand recognition to be able to truly secure a firm grip on the tablet market if it wanted to, according to the report. 

So there are a couple of possibilities here. It could be that Amazon is looking to create a Kindle that runs on Android, which would essentially be an e-reader that has apps and Web-surfing capability. But would it use the Kindle's current e-ink technology? Sounds like it would make for a weird user interface. 

The other possibility is that Amazon is working on an entirely different tablet that runs on Android, which would be interesting to see, but seems less likely since the space is already pretty crowded and Amazon would have a lot of catch-up work to do to stock up on apps. 

And personally, I doubt Amazon would want to release anything that could potentially cannibalize sales of the Kindle, which is the company's highest selling item of all time. If they made a tablet, it would likely have some kind of e-reader capability, as the iPad and other tablets do, so they would be shooting themselves in the foot. 

Image source: blogkindle.com