Rumors shared by Reuters say that Amazon has chosen Nokia Oyj as a mapping partner for its upcoming Kindle Fire tablets, which will also get location-detecting powers (perhaps via GPS or Wi-Fi signal detection).
As well as telling us that the new Fires will be more feature-complete than Amazon's original Android tablet--which was very simple at the core and designed pretty much only to serve up Amazon content--this points out that Amazon is making more deliberate moves away from Google. Amazon's forked Android operating system in the Fire is so very far away from Google's core OS that it doesn't resemble it, from a user point of view, and it seems unlikely Google extracts any revenues from Amazon.
Apple, for its part, has also cut Google off as its mapping solution. Its upcoming iOS6 release uses a proprietary mapping tech that in some ways surpasses what Google can offer--despite Google's mapping heritage.
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