Following our report last week that market research company Forrester believed an Amazon Kindle tablet would challenge the dominance of the iPad, this week more details about the tablet began to surface. While Amazon has not yet officially confirmed the launch of the tablet, which is widely expected to be announced before the December holiday season, MG Siegler, from Techcrunch, reported that he had spent some hand on time with a Design Verification Testing unit.

While he explained that he was not allowed to share pictures of the device, the Kindle Tablet reportedly displayed content in full colour, boasted a 7” capacitive touchscreen and ran on a heavily customised version of Android. While the processor speed was unconfirmed, the Kindle Tablet includes 6 GB of storage, and perhaps most significantly, cost $250 (R1700), which may just make it one of the cheapest tablets on the market. The specifications come as little surprise, as the US saw the release last year of the Nook Colour – a 7” full colour touch screen e-reader running off a customised version of the Android OS that the Kindle Tablet seems to be competing directly against with these specifications.

According to Siegler, the device looks similar to the BlackBerry Playbook in terms of its hardware, but bears no resemblance to most Android devices from a user interface point of view. In fact, Amazon has apparently eschewed the common Android OS altogether, meaning no apps store, Honeycomb or other Android features that we are accustomed to seeing.

He elaborated that instead, the main screen is a carousel, which is similar in appearance to Cover Flow in iTunes, which displays all content on the device. Unlike the existing Kindle, the Kindle Tablet will have no physical buttons on its surface, and will instead be fully touch controlled.

Siegler echoed the sentiments of Forrester, pointing out that the key for Amazon was just how deeply integrated all of their services were. “Amazon’s content store is always just one click away. The book reader is a Kindle app (which looks similar to how it does on Android and iOS now). The music player is Amazon’s Cloud Player. The movie player is Amazon’s Instant Video player. The app store is Amazon’s Android Appstore,” he elaborated. Additionally, a 10” Kindle Tablet may also be released at a further date.

The question remains: will this be enough to turn users away from an iPad, or will they simply continue as many are currently doing now, relying on a Kindle for ereading and resort to the iPad or an Android device for tablet computing?

For more follow TechSmart on Twitter and join us on Facebook.