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According to Peter Rojas, former co-founer of Engadget and now co-founder of gdgt, the highly anticipated Amazon Android tablet may be coming from Samsung. Citing only "sources within the industry," Rojas claims he's "99% certain" that Amazon is having Samsung build its tablet computer for them and it's expected to arrive no later than this summer.

He also speculates about the possibility of the tablet running Android 3.0 Honeycomb (or not), as well as what type of content Amazon plans to sell on it. (Hint: more than apps!)

Amazon EC2 is down on the East Coast and it is interrupting service to major consumer sites and platforms such as Heroku.

The service issues have led to outages at popular sites such as Foursquare, Quora, Reddit and Hootsuite. Heroku has a status page for customers about the problem. The platform relies on Amazon EC2 to serve its developer community and the associated services that use it.

Last week, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) issued a warning to mobile app developers regarding Amazon's recently launched Appstore for Android. The message, simply put: don't use it. According to the letter posted here on the IGDA website, the organization had "significant concerns" about the distribution terms, pricing policies and discounting practices Amazon used when selling developers' apps.

But after a clarification from Amazon which said the IGDA had referenced an older version of the developer agreement by mistake, many wrote off the whole situation as a simple "misunderstanding." But that's not the case, the IGDA now claims. "Amazon's terms, as they currently stand, represent a threat to game developers," reads the latest blog post from the organization.

Despite some of the challenges of lending library books in digital formats, many libraries are exploring the e-book option. However, although there are a number of choices for e-readers and digital content providers, the list of devices that let you check out library books hasn't included the most popular e-reader of all: the Kindle.

That is, until today, with the announcement from Amazon this morning that it is launching a Lending Library "later this year" that will let Kindle owners check out books from their local library.

This week, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) issued a warning to its members, suggesting they "educate themselves on the pros and cons of submitting content to Amazon." The letter refers to the recently launched Amazon Appstore, a curated market place for Android applications. The issue at hand is the pricing, or rather, Amazon's complete control of the pricing. When Amazon sells an app, it pays developers either 70% of the sale price, or 20% of the list price, whichever is greater.

It's this pricing structure that IGDA finds troubling. But do developers agree? Let's find out in this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

Amazon has just announced that it's releasing a new Kindle: "Kindle with Special Offers." This version is $25 off the regularly priced e-reader (that is, for $114 instead of $139), because those "special offers" include advertising.

The e-books themselves won't have ads in them, but the home screen and the screensaver will. Sponsors for the first series of screensavers include Buick, Proctor & Gamble, and Visa.

Ads themselves hardly qualify as "special" and neither does the rather paltry discounted price. But to sweeten the deal, Amazon says there will be "special offers" available to these Kindle owners, including half-off Amazon Gift cards, discounted Audible books and Amazon mp3 albums, and a $10 credit when you buy one of 30 Kindle bestsellers with your Visa card.

Amazon may integrate the emerging technology known as NFC (near field communication) into its mobile applications, allowing customers to pay for items at point-of-sale using only their mobile phone. The technology is currently being explored by the company's Amazon Payments unit, BusinessWeek recently reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the project.

Recent changes to Google's search algorithm have sought to reduce the rankings of what Google has described as "low quality" and "low value add" sites. And while some of these websites have seen a significant drop in traffic, we may find that content farms aren't eradicated. Rather, they're relocating. Impact Media's Mike Essex suggests their new destination may be e-books.

On the Internet, many content farms are full of unoriginal content, often scraped from other sites, and republished under different headlines. The advent of easy self-publishing makes it incredibly simple for this process to be replicated in e-books.

Even before last Monday's roll-out of the new Cloud Drive, I was storing my files in the Amazon cloud. I use Amazon S3, its Simple Storage Service, although admittedly I'm a fairly new customer. I'm using the service to host images for my personal blogs, I haven't uploaded much more than that. Yet.

I've been meaning to do so, particularly following the receipt of my first bill for the service, amounting to a whopping $0.09. I have 40 some-odd GB of music that I'd like to store (and be able to play) in the cloud, for example.

But the introduction of the Cloud Drive has made me rethink my plans. Should I move my files there? Here are some of the pros and cons:

Amazon has just launched a suite of music products that allow users to store their tracks online and them stream them over the Web or to any Android device courtesy of the Amazon MP3 mobile application. The launch has the tech world abuzz, not only because Amazon beat Apple and Google to the punch, both of whom are reportedly working on digital lockers of their own, but because Amazon hasn't even received the record labels' permission to host these tracks on its servers as of yet.

But is Amazon's cloud-based music storage service really all that innovative? Some journalists and analysts are saying it's not. Do you agree?