Amazon’s Kindle platform lets you purchase and read eBooks on an iPhone, BlackBerry, PC, or a Kindle eBook reader. So far there’s no app for Android. But as Kevin Tofel points out, it looks like a Kindle reader for Android could be coming soon.
The folks at Engadget got their hands on a couple of leaked documents from Dell for the company’s upcoming Dell Mini 5 tablet. The Mini 5 will be a 5 inch device with an 800 x 480 pixel display, an ARM-based processor, and Google Android. And if the slides obtained by Engadget are anything to go by, it will feature a suite of applications from Amazon including Amazon MP3, Amazon video on demand, and a Kindle eBook reader.
There’s already an excellent Amazon MP3 app for Android that lets you find, purchase, and download music. The Kindle and video on demand apps would be new. I suspect the Kindle app would look a lot like the iPhone app, which is to say it will be an excellent way to access the hundreds of thousands of eBooks Amazon offers, if not necessarily the best app for reading books if you care about things like changing the background color or dimming the display.
The video on demand feature could also be an awesome addition to the Android ecosystem. Right now you can watch YouTube videos on Android devices, but that’s about it for online video. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for Android is in the works, so it’s possible that the Amazon video app will basically rely on Flash — the same technology it uses to stream video to desktop computers. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon develops a tool that lets you stream video without using Flash — much the way you can with YouTube videos currently. Odds are this would use fewer system resources.
It’s not clear if and when these apps will be available for Android devices that aren’t the Dell Mini 5.
