Report: Amazon Wants To Buy WebOS; That Could Mean Kindle Phones, PCs Too
HP’s WebOS is up in the air and we now have a new player that apparently wants to catch it: Amazon. A report in VentureBeat quotes sources who say that Amazon is in “advanced negotiations” to buy WebOS. Furthermore, those sources note that Hewlett Packard wants to relieve itself of the WebOS burden ASAP -- despite HP saying that it would stick by WebOS, even after announcing to dump its hardware business.
For Amazon, the idea would be to use WebOS as a basis for its new line of tablets -- rather than the forked version of Android that Amazon is currently using to power its Kindle Fire tablet unveiled earlier this week after what seemed like decades of speculation. Perhaps more significantly, Amazon could also use the platform to power other products in the future, too -- such as smartphones and PCs, both areas where Amazon could naturally move, given its strong position in mobile retail already, plus its huge push to cloud computing with Amazon Web Services. For those who might think that an Amazon/HP tie-up sounds out of the blue, it’s not: Jon Rubinstein, the former Palm head, joined the board of Amazon in December last year as a director.