According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the US online retail giant, Amazon. com is planning to launch an Android-based tablet as early as October to the customers.

Analysts say that through Amazon’s tablet will not knock out Apple iPad from the market; it does have a real chance of becoming a serious competitor to the popular tablet.

The tablet carries a strong brand image, its launching during the holiday shopping season, the 9.7 inch screen size is widely preferred, Android is a popular crowd puller and users are finally accepting the idea of tablets other than from Apple.

According to some reports, Amazon will ship as many as 1 million of its tablet computers in the third quarter of the year. Amazon’s tablet will run on open source Android platform and if it is able to attract a significant number of buyers, it will be the first Android powered tablet to give a serious competition to Apple’s iPad, according to PCWorld. com.

According to a July 7 research report by Canaccord Genuity, analyst T. Michael Walkley and his co-authors, Amazon might be able to get a market share of about 5 per cent soon in the tablet computer market.

CEO Jeff Bezos had only hinted potential tablet months ago and Samsung was expected to build the device. Amazon could offer several of its popular services on the tablet to make it more appealing to the customers, for example access to its streaming movie library, music downloads, Amazon Instant Video Amazon Cloud Drive, the Amazon Android App Store and the Kindle store.