Now the world's largest book retailer is in the tablet arena, and what better way to take on Apple than to enter the market with an . Amazon's tablet, which will likely arrive this later this year, will reportedly ship in 7 and 10-inch versions, and it will run on Nvidia's upcoming quad-core processor.

Amazon will also likely leverage its lead in the e-books market over iTunes, while still hedging its bets--there is an Amazon app for the iPad, after all. By bringing out an Android device, Amazon may head off the developer of Android--which now has its own movie store and music player. In other words, there's a lot at stake, as the business model for media moves from products that Amazon sells and ships to products that consumers receive via download.

But the other end of the spectrum is how tablets are being used for business. iPad CTO already predicted that . But isn't this too harsh of an observation--ignored, possibly, but hated?

Tablets remain good content-consumption devices, great for reading a book, watching a movie, or listening to music. But many analysts note that tablets are not as good for as a laptop. The Kindle, which can display PDFs from a PC, already has been a good consumption device for business users. An Amazon tablet could be the next step.

As Forbes noted this week, last year , a touchscreen technology startup to add touchscreen functionality to the Kindle. This could be easily leveraged into an Amazon tablet. A touchscreen remains crucial for a tablet, and Amazon isn't wasting time getting touchy-feely.