Amazon has probably 10 times that many Kindle users or more already, and if HP sells Palm at a 90% discount that's still $120 per TouchPad user who may or may not ever upgrade to an Amazon Kindle. That would be a stupid way to acquire users.

Also, if you think WebOS is somehow immune to the plague of lawsuits in this industry you're crazy. Nobody is safe from lawsuits. It's just a cost of doing business these days; you pay your success tax and you move on.

> Amazon has probably 10 times that many Kindle users or more already

Kindle users may very well prove to be a different demographic than tablet users. If they sell 10 million Fires then they will probably be out-selling iPads in that space, can't see that happening. A lot of Kindle users will stick to Kindle because they just want to read books on an e-ink screen.

> Also, if you think WebOS is somehow immune to the plague of lawsuits in this industry you're crazy. Nobody is safe from lawsuits.

Do you have any idea how many mobile patents Palm has?

You realize most of Palm's pre-webOS patents weren't even owned by Palm by the time it was sold to HP, right? These guys (formerly Palmsource) own most of them: http://www.access-company.com/

All that's left are the webOS-centric patents for the most part, and patent applications such as the card metaphor (which would put QNX in a REALLY bad position if granted) are still pending.

Take a look at this from back in 2009 when Apple were raising the possibility of sueing Palm over the original Pre being too close to their iPhone (according to them):

http://technologizer.com/2009/01/23/palm-responds-to-apple-i...

Of course this never happened, because to quote Palm at the time:

"Palm has a long history of innovation that is reflected in our products and robust patent portfolio, and we have long been recognized for our fundamental patents in the mobile space. If faced with legal action, we are confident that we have the tools necessary to defend ourselves."

Note that this statement was written well after the spin-off of Palmsource.

It's not difficult to ascertain that ACCESS/Palmsource very likely granted unconditional use of the patents to the existing Palm that sold those very patents to them, therefore giving it basically unfettered rights to defend itself against Apple in this scenario.

I think -- although I am not sure -- that you have to own a patent in order to sue for infringement, which -- if true -- puts a big hole in your argument.

Now patents might be a good reason to buy Palm, but that's completely separate from the fate of WebOS. Amazon could take the patents and throw WebOS away.

I could see Amazon using the card metaphor as a custom multitasking Android launcher with full power of a pending patent application behind it while ditching the remainder of the OS. It's the one distinction webOS has had in UX and one that's generally garnered the most positive attention.

I could not, however, see Amazon hedging on Android by holding webOS in state. That would be a rather insane move given the audience the Kindle Fire will attract from Day One.

What about Dalvik and the on-going Oracle case? webOS has no Java, there is another distinction for you. It's the full stack in webOS that is unique, not just the UI.

That's partially true; webOS 3.0 has no Java as far as I'm aware, deferring to node.js for its services instead. webOS prior to that (e.g., Mojo era) contains an absolute trove of Java all over the damned place. I remember dissecting the media system looking for private APIs in parallel with developing a webOS application and many points led right back to Java-based services that assisted in doing a lot of perfunctory tasks.

In fact, I distinctly remember asking the Palm webOS developers when I discovered in their Java-based media services a particular call that instantly parsed SHOUTcast/Icecast-style playlists of many various formats with ease whether it'd become a public API call. It never did.

If HP races to finally reconcile the two sides as a promised a half-year ago a la Android's ICS, then there might be no obstacles to the Java argument. Until then, however...

> Amazon could take the patents and throw WebOS away.

...along with at least 1 million webOS users? Who are currently buying software from the webOS store, and are likely to buy future webOS hardware from Amazon (or whoever else how makes it)? Really?

There's no market for TouchPad software. Those customers just bought TouchPads because they were cheap, not because they want to use them regularly (like iPad and probably Kindle Fire). If TouchPad wasn't $99, they couldn't even sell 25,000 of them. They sold 1M by losing money and going out of business, not by creating an ecosystem which can 'trap' customers (and make them buy their future products just because their apps and music works only on that device) like what Apple and Amazon do.

Actually, I had just been waiting for the price to come down, but I am going to use my Touchpad for just about everything but development. I love WebOS, and I'm not saying there are many of us, but WebOS fans are pretty devoted. Kind of like Apple fanboys back in the day.

> There's no market for TouchPad software.

Tell that to this guy: http://twitter.com/#!/PalmFlashCards/status/1147168660978442...

I don't buy that they are buying user profiles. The ability to run WebOS apps on the Kindle would be interesting, but buying such a small app market and spending the extra money to integrate it, I don't know if I buy that. And a complete move the WebOS? Abandoning the people who bought in to the Amazon App Store? No way. Moving to WebOS and making that able to run Android apps makes more sense, but I still don't see any incentive there. The Fire will be a huge success, and it looks like it works pretty good out of the box, and that should only improve with time. Why would they bother to start over with a move to WebOS?

It is a little premature to say that there is no danger of being sued as most of the litigation around Android surfaced recently (almost after it began to gain traction) and not back in 2008 when it first launched?

With all the bogus patents out there, it is hard to imagine any complex mobile system that doesn't infringe on _something_ out there.