It's pretty much nailed on, according to the omnipresent online rumour mill at least, that Amazon will launch a follow up to the Amazon Kindle Fire early in 2012.

All reports point towards a more beefier, in terms of hardware, device - one possibly packing an Nvidia Tegra 3 chip and maybe doing the rounds at Amazon HQ with the codename Hollywood.

Until now, there wasn't much talk of screen-size for this new device - 10-inch was probably the most common assumption - but Taiwan-based industry website Digitimes has blown the lid off of that hypothesis by stating that orders for 8.9-inch displays are in.

"Amazon's current 7-inch panel suppliers Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT) and LG Display (LGD) reportedly have begun to prepare production capacities for 8.9-inch displays," it stated.

The report also hints that we may be seeing three new Amazon tablets in 2012 with both a 9.7- and 10.1-inch model possibly following the 8.9-inch one.

Back in September, gdgt stated that the Amazon Kindle Fire would be more of a "stopgap" and, as a result, a "pretty poor" device. In terms of hardware, this could be accepted as true.

Its report stated that the Fire had been delayed, thus throwing Amazon's release schedule into disarray; apparently the plan was never to launch two tablets in such a short time frame. The second tablet is described as "the device Amazon really believes in".

Whether this tablet is the 8.9-inch that looks to be in the works remains to be seen.

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