Amazon May Push Into Tablet PCs

Amazon.com AMZN was ambushed by Apple Inc AAPL when Jobs & Co. launched the iPad. It was close enough in price to the Amazon Kindle and had more features. Amazon eventually dropped prices low enough to give it a chance to hold market share, but that means it margins on the unit dropped as well. It will have to make those margins up on sales of e-books, which is hardly a sure thing. Amazon may be about to strike back. It has begun to hire an army of hardware engineers. The New York Times caught on to this. The skunk works project in dubbed Lab 126. Its goals appear to be to create larger and more powerful Kindles with color screens. Amazon may be wise to go “up-market”. The margins there are certainly higher. Dell DELL has entered the sector with its Streak product. There are rumors that both Hewlett-Packard HPQ and Microsoft MSFT will soon enter the business. To read the rest, head over to 247WallStreet.com