Amazon considering new hardware lines alongside the Kindle?
Buoyed by the massive success that has been their Kindle e-reader device, Amazon are now thought to be spreading their wings further in the hardware market, potentially looking at media playback devices.
New job postings at the company’s Lab 126 research and development centre (the team responsible for developing the Kindle itself) have popped up, showing Amazon are on the look out for a new Hardware Engineer and RF Systems Engineer. According to The New York Times there is “a good chance these engineers will be recruited to build other gadgets that Amazon is prototyping in its secret labs,” with an anonymous Amazon source cited as saying that Lab 126 are “looking into building other gadgets that it could sell to consumers.”
Another source states that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, has been looking into Amazon branded “music players and other electronics,” since the opening of Lab 126.
Media playback devices, if web connected, make perfect sense for Amazon. As well known these days as much for sales of films and music as they are books, tying a tasty portable media device exclusively into their own online store could generate massive sales, in much the same way that Apple’s iTunes store has done with the iPod, iPad and iPhone.
Via: NYT
