Following Amazon’s introduction of its new Kindle Fire tablet earlier this week, reports Friday suggest that the online retail giant is presently engaged in talks to acquire Hewlett-Packard’s webOS mobile operating system, which HP picked up via its 2010 $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm.
Sources at HP conferring with VentureBeat indicate that HP is looking to divest webOS in the immediate future.
Despite a flurry of reports noting no shortage of potential buyers, it now appears that Amazon is the leading contender to take webOS off of HP’s hands very soon.
Former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein – now a member of Amazon’s board of directors – told This Is My Next last July that he could see Amazon as a logical buyer of webOS.
“We’d like a partner that would allow us to expand the webOS ecosystem,” Rubinstein said. “There’s a variety of different sets of a characteristics to qualify as a good partner. I would say Amazon would certainly make a great partner because they have a lot of characteristics that would help them expand the webOS ecosystem. As to whether there’s been discussions or not… that’s obviously not something I’m going to comment about.”
Requests for comment from HP and Amazon have not yet produced any official feedback regarding today’s hottest rumor in the tech world.
