From nowhere, to absolute must have product, to ‘completely free' in the space of 18 months? Will that really be the fate of the tablet PC? Is mega-retailer Amazon, ready to do something Amazing?  KitGuru tries to read the after images on our Kindle.

While Samsung, Motorola and others are pushing hard to lose a fortune in the high-end tablet PC market against Apple, it now looks like they might have even less to look forward to.

Initial eBooks did not create much interest. There was a severe disconnect between the reader and the material. Cue Amazon.

Sick of paying millions in warehouse storage, logistic and courier fees, the book giant focused its efforts on creating (arguably) the best eBook reader in the market with the Kindle.  Then came the stroke of pure genius.

“Why should the customer pay for bandwidth to download the product?  Why not simply off-load that cost to the book supplier?”   And a new day dawned.

Now, with somewhere close to 20 million Kindle readers in the market – and growing fast – Amazon is looking to change the world completely in November 2011.

How?  By giving away tablet PCs in order to sell more books. Now THAT's what KitGuru calls a revolution.

KitGuru says: Can't wait to see how this puts the cat among the pigeons. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of what's going to be evolving in the various retail markets over the next year or two. Cisco is moving to servers and considering giving away all of the office software you will ever need – directly attacking Microsoft. Intel now owns an OS company. Will ‘own the hardware – get the software for free' or ‘ sell the software and give the hardware away' win?

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