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.