The tablet 
category may soon get a major new entry. On Wednesday, Amazon will hold a news conference in New York -- and most observers expect the giant retailer will unveil a tablet.
Invitations to the event were sent out Friday, simply asking the recipient to "please join us for an Amazon.com press conference." Rumors of the tablet have been flying for several months, but the key competitive angle may be the pricing. The tablet is expected to retail for about $250, compared with a starting price of $499 for Apple's iPad .
7-Inch Display?
The Kindle-branded tablet is expected to run a version of Google's open-source platform, Android , possibly with a custom interface and an Amazon-only app store. The product is expected to be on sale either next month or by November.
Although there have been a variety of iPad wannabees in recent months -- including products by HP, Samsung, and RIM -- none have become a major competitor to the iPad, which invented and dominates the category. But Amazon starts with a variety of strengths that the others did not.
These include the success of its e-reader Kindle, the company's huge online retailing audience and operation, and the availability of a large supply of high quality content, including e-books, videos and music.
But there may also be at least one substantial difference for the initial Kindle tablet that makes a direct comparison to the iPad difficult. The first Amazon tablet is expected to have a 7-inch display, compared to the iPad's 9.7-inch screen. Although Samsung's Galaxy Tab comes in a 7-inch model, some observers have suggested that the 7-inch side of the tablet market is a hard sell, since it seems to be too big for easy carrying in a pocket, but too small to be as useful as the larger model.
Building Its Own Roads
If the first Kindle tablet is a 7-inch, however, the follow-up model expected in a few months could be closer to 9 inches.
Some analysts have suggested that, instead of trying to breach the very high wall erected by the iPad, Amazon is building its own roads around it. For example, the company has recently worked out deals with 11,000 public libraries in the U.S. to offer Kindle e-books on loan through the libraries. There also have been reports that Amazon is looking to set up a "Netflix for books," in which users pay a monthly subscription and get access to a certain number of books.
In that line of thinking, the 7-inch Kindle's initial target might not be the iPad, but Barnes & Noble's Nook Color. The Nook Color has corrected most of the problems the product had at its launch and has been attracting a lot of attention. A 7-inch Kindle tablet could offer the same form factor but with much more content and many more apps .
There is also the possibility that Amazon will be using its new tablet as a loss leader, the way wireless carriers subsidize smartphones because they also get contracts for phone services. As with the Netflix-for-books model, a package of services may be tied with the Amazon tablet to amortize the cost over a year or more.
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