Amazon is entering the multimedia tablet business with its new Kindle Fire, and may be working on a deal to buy Palm and its webOS from HP, too. Anonymous sources claim that negotiations between Amazon and HP are already well under way, which means the Web retailer could get its hands on Palm’s assets soon.
VentureBeat reported that HP is working hard to fund a buyer for Palm and that Amazon is farther along than any other company in striking a deal.
HP bought the ailing Palm with plans to make a big move into the tablet space Apple currently dominates with the iPad. Months after announcing its own tablet, however, HP released the TouchPad to bad reviews and disinterested customers. The company killed the device after only 49 days on the market, and pulled the plug on webOS, too.
Assuming Amazon is actively working to buy Palm, it’ll likely get a deal that’s better than the US$1.2 billion HP paid for the company since both the hardware and software projects it was working on have been dropped. The deal would also give Amazon its own operating system it could use for future Kindle tablets instead of relying on Google’s Android OS as it does for the Kindle Fire.
Amazon and HP haven’t commented on the reported negotiations.
5 Comments Leave Your Own
Apple needs to jump on WebOS before anyone else does. They missed it last time and regretted it.
@distarr7 I wouldn’t say Apple has many regrets in their phone strategy to date. And are you saying they should buy WebOS just to kill it? I’d much rather see it find a good home where it will be developed and put into compelling consumer products. Competition is good!
Agreed. I’d rather see Amazon buy it and make a good alternative to Android than Apple buying it and it vanishing from the light of day. A viable third option would IMO eat into Android before iOS.
No, I say they buy it, and incorporate what they can into iOS. The multitasking on WebOS is better then iOS (imo) and the notifications /were/ better, just to name a few.
I had a Pre for a while and was mightily impressed by it.
Wouldn’t the patients alone would be worth the price?
WebOS would also take them off the Fandroid hit list for branching Android. Although it they may stay there for dumping Android altogether.
Amazon has many good reasons to get WebOS off HP for the same reasons Apple has iOS. Vertical integration benefits Amazon as much as it currently does Apple.
Google could also now pull of the same ecosystem but likely won’t.
.... Why would Apple need WebOS? Buying it to kill it would likely be enough to bring anti-trust regulation over to eyeball things. Apple would likely be happy if someone could take WebOS and get it seriously running. The more “good” competition Apple has the more brutal they can be to aping companies like Samsung.
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