Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Amazon has expanded its trade-in program to allow customers to send in their used electronics for gift cards that can be used on the ecommerce site.

The retail giant will eat the shipping costs in the deal, letting users price out the value of their products — including cell phones, tablets and digital cameras — on the Amazon trade-in site, assign a condition (“like new, “ “good,” or “acceptable,”) and print off a shipping label.

Assuming Amazon agrees with the customer’s assessment of the product’s condition, the company says it will credit their account “generally in less than 48 hours” after receiving it.

The move puts Amazon in competition with Gazelle, which has paid out more than $25 million in cash to customers for used electronics since launching in 2008. At first glance, it would appear that Amazon is offering slightly more ($178 to $158 for a good condition iPhone 3GS 16GB, $271 to $260 for a Motorola Xoom tablet), though Gazelle is offering cash to Amazon’s gift cards.

Prior to today, Amazon’s trade-in program already included video games, DVDs and textbooks.

Image courtesy of Flickr, blmurch

If Best Buy’s $800 price for Motorola’s Xoom — the company’s powerful Android 3.0 tablet — seems too big a pill to swallow, maybe you’ll find it a bit easier with Verizon’s 24-month data plan, which lowers the price of the device to $600.

Of course, it means you’ll have to pay at least $20 per month for 1G of 3G data, which increases the overall cost considerably. But if you planned to purchase a data plan for the Xoom anyway, this deal might not be too shabby.

Verizon also reminds potential customers that the Xoom will be upgradable to 4G LTE service for free in the second quarter of 2011.

Besides the 3G (and, later on, 4G), the Motorola Xoom sports a 10.1” widescreen HD display, a 1 GHz dual-core CPU, a 5-megapixel camera on the rear and a 2-megapixel one on the front, Wi-Fi support, an accelerometer and a HDMI output.

What kind of impact has Apple’s iPad had on the tablet market? In just one quarter, the iPad helped drive up sales of media tablets by 45% and took nearly 90% of the market.

A new report from IDC shows that both the media tablet market and the e-reader market made big leaps in 2010. The market for media tablets grew from 3.3 million in Q2 to 4.8 million in Q3, an increase of 45.1%. That growth was fueled almost exclusively by the iPad. In Q3, Apple sold 4.19 million iPads, representing over 87% of the media tablet market.

IDC defines media tablets as devices larger than five inches and less than 14 inches running “lightweight operating systems,” primarily iOS and Android.

E-readers experienced rapid growth as well, led by the Amazon Kindle. 1.14 million Kindles were shipped in Q3, representing 41.5% of the e-reader market. Unexpectedly though, the Pandigital Novel (440 million) beat out the Barnes and Noble Nook (420 million) for second place.

The most interesting part of the report though was the overall forecasts for 2010, 2011 and 2012. For 2010, IDC predicts that about 17 million media tablets will be shipped (they’re still counting up the numbers), but that it will grow to a whopping 44.6 million in 2011 and 70.8 million in 2012. If devices like the iPad 2 and the Motorola Xoom succeed though, then IDC might have to revise its numbers.

Will Apple be able to sustain its massive lead in the tablet market, or will Android start eating into that market share? We’re going to find out soon.