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by sksultan 5375 days ago
a) HP's probably offering it for pennies. Too good of a deal for any tablet/mobile player.

b) Amazon Silk is a game changer that probably has Google fuming. Buying Palm is probably a hedge bet in case Google clamps down. The end-user platform(devise, OS, browser) war between Google, Apple, and MS is to control the user data. Amazon wants to make sure it has an unrestricted piece of that data.
3 comments
mappu 5375 days ago
I don't know if Silk has Google "fuming"..

Opera Mini has been doing the remote-rendering thing for years and years now. It is the most widely used mobile browser, with 113+ million users and 2+ billion daily pageviews.

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alttag 5375 days ago 

  > [Opera] is the most widely used mobile browser
Use appears to be mostly from Asia. In Europe, iPhone leads by a wide margin, followed by Android; in North America, Android leads, followed by iPhone [2]. Opera makes at best a fourth place showing on these continents.

To your point about "fuming", I think you're right. There's no evidence that Google's analytics or search (advertising) products will be negatively impacted by silk.

1: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-eu-monthly-201009-... 2: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-na-monthly-201009-...

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nazar 5375 days ago
I can narrow down Asia to Post Soviet asian countries such as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan etc. Internet is normally overpriced in these countries and opera mini has nice compression features and dedicated "turn off images" button, which is very handy. And not everyone here can afford high end iOS/android devices, so for Symbian, Opera mini is the best choice.
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pyrmont 5375 days ago
Amazon is just about to start encouraging people to buy Android applications for the Amazon App Store that presumably wouldn't work on a webOS tablet. If Amazon are in the running, it can only be for the patent portfolio.

If Google were to clamp down on Android, why wouldn't Amazon just continue developing their Android fork? Seems like it would be a lot more effort to get webOS to where they need it to be.

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rkalla 5375 days ago
Interesting take on it being a preemptive move. I wouldn't have seen that kind of competitive advantage in owning Palm... again, since it doesn't look to be a talent acquisitions and it isn't for patents (?) then the only thing left is WebOS, in which case what do these guys want with a incompatible clean-room OS?

Google already has too many mobile OS's and Amazon's expertise is elsewhere.

I feel like I'm missing some core component of Palm here that makes it valuable to even still be talked about. Had they had some amazing version of Android with a custom browser and all that, I'd understand this a lot more quickly.

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