"We don't know for sure what Amazon is doing, and they've been very quiet," O'Donnell said.

Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates, said Amazon is rumored to be replacing the e-ink display in its Kindle with an LCD display and equipping the device with an Android OS instead of proprietary software.

Gold said the 1.2 million shipments of Amazon tablets in the third quarter as reported by DigiTimes "could make sense" given how successful Amazon has been in the past with the Kindle.

Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. Follow Matt on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

in Computerworld's Mobile and Wireless Topic Center.