You may think that along with Palm’s fall, you’ll never hear the terms WebOS and smartphone in the same sentence again. But it seems HP had bigger plans for this operating system. HP senior vice president Eric Cador has confirmed that new WebOS smartphones are on their way and probably will be arriving in early 2011. His actual words were “You will see us coming early next year with new phones” which isn’t much but at least we know that WebOS hasn’t yet faded into oblivion.
HP is a leader on such markets as servers, PC hardware and IT services but it lacks what it takes to be a true competitor on the mobile computing area. To this end, on July 1st, 2010, Hewlett-Packard completed the purchase of Palm for $1.2 billion, buying in fact the WebOS platform and not only a ticket towards the smartphone market but also a way to break through into different mobile computing areas, as this purchase creates “additional opportunities beyond smartphones” according to Todd Bradley, vice president of HP’s personal systems group and formerly a CEO of Palm, who mentioned the terms slate and tablet computers. Although Palm’s WebOS currently runs solely on phones, this looks like a cheaper and faster way into the phone business than manufacturing new phones that could run Microsoft’s OS or Google’s Android: “Palm brings HP a modern and competitive platform that is already designed, implemented and in production. This saves HP many R&D dollars as well as dramatically accelerates time to market” said Jack Gold, analyst with J. Gold Associates.
While HP hopes to create a real competition for HTC, Nokia and mainly Google, RIM’s BlackBerry and Apple’s iOS mostly likely remaining untouched by HP’s success due to their own stable market segments, many argue that Palm’s purchase was a mistake and Palm can’t deliver the brand and intellectual property that HP really needs and that HP should have tried to hire Palm’s people individually at a much lower expense. This comes after claims from loyalists that the WebOS is in fact superior to other competing platforms like Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android but this didn’t necessarily helped Palm escape its demise, as seen before with other technically superior gadgets that ultimately ended up falling, like the Sega Dreamcast game console, the IBM OS/2 desktop operating system or the HD DVD format.
Even before the launch of the iPad, there were rumors concerning a Windows 7 based HP slate tablet, but after the purchase of Palm, these turned into a WebOS tablet rumors. Whether HP cancelled all plans for the Slate tablet or decided only to add a WebOS tablet alongside the slate it remains to be seen. For now, we can only wait to see what HP has in mind for their “new” mobile operating system.
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