Coming Soon From Amazon: Kindle Towering Inferno

Here’s another report to add to the chorus of predictions that Amazon is gearing up to launch a larger version of its Kindle Fire tablet. The occasionally reliable Digitimes claims that Foxconn has won the contract for a new 10-inch Fire and is expected to begin shipping the devices in the second quarter of 2012.

More Kindle Fire augury, I know. But it does jibe with recent reports from China Times and Pacific Crest analyst Chad Bartley, who both claim that Amazon’s got a bigger Fire in the pipeline.

Why does Amazon even need to bring a larger Fire to market? Perhaps to take on the iPad in the market it created? Or perhaps it has decided that the device’s current 7-inch form factor isn’t as optimal as it once thought — something Apple CEO Steve Jobs remarked on back in 2010.

“One naturally thinks that a seven-inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen,” Jobs said. “Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The screen measurements are diagonal, so that a seven-inch screen is only 45 percent as large as iPad’s 10-inch screen. You heard me right: Just 45 percent as large. If you take an iPad and hold it upright in portrait view, and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on these seven-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the iPad’s display. This size isn’t sufficient to create great tablet apps, in our opinion. … The seven-inch tablets are tweeners, too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad.”