Amazon's Tablet the Kindle Fire Designed After the PlayBook?

According to Ryan Block over at gdgt, Amazon’s new tablet set to be announced this Wednesday is in fact built by the same people who built the RIM PlayBook.  How is that the case you ask?  According to Block’s sources, RIM originally outsourced a substantial amount of the hardware design and production of the PlayBook to Quanta, which is a company that builds, and sometimes helps design, hardware for name brands.

And when Amazon decided to do an Android tablet, the team at Amazon known as called Lab 126 (the Kindle team) apparently chose not to take on the project and focus their efforts on working exclusively on next-gen E-Ink-based devices.  This left Amazon’s executive team without an experienced team to build the device.  So what did they do?  Amazon turned to Quanta.

Fortunately (or not? we’ll have to wait and see) for Amazon since the Quanta developed the PlayBook it allowed Amazon to bypass most of the hardware selection process by using the PlayBook as their hardware template.  However, as Block mentions it wasn’t that simple (it never is), he notes that Amazon ran into trouble, and eventually made certain sacrifices like using a slower processor.

Interestingly enough, it seems Block’s sources go on to state that the first tablet of Amazon’s is “supposed to be pretty poor” and is act as “stopgap.”  So in other words, Amazon wants in the tablet market and they want in bad.  Most likely so they can get on people’s 2011 holiday wish list.  It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out for Amazon and whether that ends up hurting or helping them in the long run.

If you were planning on picking up a Kindle Fire, does this information make you second guess your decision?  Do you think you may end up holding off?