We might already be getting hints as to the direction Amazon will go in for its successor to the Kindle Fire tablet. According to VentureBeat, Amazon are said to be in “serious negotiations” to pick up what’s left of Palm and its WebOS software from HP.
HP’s tablet, the HP Touchpad, recently shot to the number two slot in the UK tablet market, but only after slashing its price to £89 to try and shift hundreds of tablets left over after a poor run of sales.
According to an anonymous tipster, HP is eager to ditch Palm, with several potential buyers lined up to take charge of the struggling smartphone and tablet company. Amazon is reportedly the favourite to take on stewardship of Palm, with the speculation being that it will use Palm’s tech savvy in its next Amazon tablet, which has been rumoured to be arriving as soon as Q1 next year.
We’re thinking there might be some credibility to this rumour; Amazon’s current tablet, the Kindle Fire, was produced for the company by Taiwan’s Quanta Computer, which also manufacture the BlackBerry PlayBook. From what we’ve seen on the tablet, it looks like Amazon has taken more than just a few pointers from RIM’s ill-fated tablet, with the Fire an almost perfect PlayBook doppelganger. If Amazon did borrow a large part of its tablet technology from RIM this time around, it makes sense that the company would be in the market for its own in-house tablet development arm.
Source: VentureBeat
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