HTC Investments Hint at OnLive for Android Tablets

Posted 02/08/2011 at 10:12am | by Paul Lilly

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HTC made a couple of rather interesting moves this week, starting with the "strategic investment in Saffron Digital," or so HTC says on its website. According to The Wall Street Journal, HTC will acquire the London-based mobile platform firm outright, which HTC says will prove a "key asset as content becomes more and more complex and localized." But that's only half the story.

HTC, which has built a following by being one of the first to aggressively support Google's Android platform in the smartphone sector, is also investing $40 million into OnLive, company spokeswoman Maggie Cheng told The Wall Street Journal. According to Cheng, HTC is picking up 5.3 million OnLive shares at $7.50 a pop.

The rest is speculation, but these investments would seem to indicate that OnLive is headed for Android tablets. With the upcoming launch of Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), HTC and other tablet makers will finally have a viable Android OS to built a slate around. And because OnLive relies on the cloud rather than a local CPU or graphics hardware, well, you see where this is going.

Does the thought of OnLiving gaming on a tablet excite you, or will you stick with your PC/console, thank you very much?