Amazon Reportedly Interested in Buying Palm

Posted 09/30/2011 at 8:55am | by Paul Lilly

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Amazon reportedly has Palm in its sights and is super close to pulling the trigger on a deal that could benefit both it and Hewlett Packard. Let's face it, HP screwed the pooch with its Palm acquisition with its 180 on webOS hardware, and even though the company claims it's committed to focusing on webOS software, that was never the sole intention. It's not surprising HP is shopping Palm, but will Amazon make a move?

A report in VentureBeat has the deal nearly finalized. According to VentureBeat's "well-placed sources," HP is desperate to shake Palm from its grip, and Amazon is the closest one to making a deal. The two are said to be in "serious negotiations."

Does the deal make sense? Amazon is one of the few companies that could take webOS and run with it. The mega online retailer just announced its Kindle Fire tablet, a $200 slate sporting a heavily modified version of Google's Android OS. It's Android at the core, but the UI is all Amazon with several in-house services tightly integrated into the device. Imagine what Amazon could do with its own OS, one that's as slick and capable as webOS.

On the flip side, Palm probably won't come cheap, though expect the asking price to be much less than the $1.2 billion HP paid back in 2010.