You’ll Have to Wait Until February for HP’s WebOS Tablet
Posted in: hewlett-packard, HP, palm, Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili, webos
The news we were all hoping for finally hit this week: HP is getting ready to show off its new webOS-based tablet.
Sadly for those of us in Las Vegas, it’s not going to happen at the Consumer Electronics Show here. Instead, HP’s planning an “exciting webOS announcement” for February 9 in San Francisco.
The invitations (shown above) went out today, and while they don’t mention a tablet, it’s a good bet that a webOS-based slate will be on the agenda — plus, perhaps, HP-branded successors to Palm’s tepidly successful webOS-based smartphones, the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi.
Hewlett-Packard acquired Palm in 2010 for about $1.2 billion, a purchase that more or less saved Palm from yet another ignominious decline into obscurity, but left many observers wondering what HP was thinking.
The Palm and Pre (and their successors, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus) were ambitious attempts to compete with Android phones and the iPhone, and the phones offer striking industrial design, elegant user interfaces, clever multitasking and a web-based development environment.
But the phones haven’t proven popular with consumers, thanks in part to poor battery life and the relative lack of webOS applications.
HP’s intentions became clearer in July, 2010, when HP CTO Phil McKinney started promising a webOS-based tablet and webOS-based printer to come in “early 2011.” For such devices, a lightweight, web-based mobile operating system makes a lot of sense, and competitors have less of a head start than in the smartphone market.
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