Hasta La Gadget!

Rumor has it that HP is preparing to enter the cloud-based music storage fray. A reader at PreCentral sent in what purports to be a confidential PowerPoint presentation indicating the TouchPad will launch with an HP-branded music and movie store, as well as a smart syncing service that caches frequently accessed media for local playback. This may very well be the “Music Synergy” that SVP Steven McArthur mentioned to us. Amazon has already launched such an app and it’s all but official that Google is planning the same thing, so it only makes sense that the company would want to imbue webOS with similar powers. We can’t verify these claims ourselves and the slide above is clearly a wonky Photoshop job, but it’s would hardly be surprising after snatching up Melodeo and the streaming music service Nutsie. And, while webOS and Android are working to banish the quaint ritual of plugging your cellphone into a computer, we can only imagine what the Lala team is up to — maybe Jobs has them washing his turtlenecks.

HP may bless webOS with cloud-syncing music store originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Apr 2011 18:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You don’t have to be a coder to appreciate the wonders that a software development kit can contain, especially when there’s a nice emulator tucked in there to give an early taste of things to come. That’s exactly what can be found within the webOS 3.0 SDK, and that SDK is exactly what’s been leaked to the world, giving anyone who wants it the ability to play with the OS that’ll make the HP TouchPad tick. PreCentral.net took the emulator within for a heck of a test drive, providing a lengthy textual overview of everything from keyboards to calendars, along with the video that’s embedded below. Sure, clicking and dragging in an early emulator isn’t nearly as much fun as tapping and swiping on some beautiful hardware, but it sure does cut down on the smudgy fingerprints. It’s cheaper, too.

Continue reading Beta 1 for webOS 3.0 leaks, lets you touch the TouchPad a little early (video)

Beta 1 for webOS 3.0 leaks, lets you touch the TouchPad a little early (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Apr 2011 07:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Voodoo founder Rahul Sood has never shied from controversy — he famously cut a cake with a MacBook Air during his tenure at HP — and today he’s expressing his love for Apple hardware from his pulpit as a Microsoft exec. “Every executive in the PC industry should use an Apple notebook,” Sood tweeted today, implying that they were of higher quality than those that come with Windows by default. That certainly sounds a bit like a shot at Microsoft, but according to ConceivablyTech he may actually be pointing at his former employer HP, as a series of private status updates point to HP’s unwillingness to compete at the high end of the laptop marketplace. “We could have done it – just need a few years of patience, and investment in our tooling/process,” the message reportedly reads, “We really could have done it. […] ‎…especially with webOS, what a combination that would have been.” We’re actually pretty happy with our Envy 14 — lack of Radiance Display aside — but we can’t help wondering if it coulda been a contender with Voodoo DNA on board.

Microsoft’s Rahul Sood says every PC industry exec should use a MacBook originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Mar 2011 17:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HP’s having a blowout webOS developer event here in San Francisco to bookend its big product announcements from this morning, and it kicked things off with a personnel announcement — Richard Kerris is taking over as head of webOS developer relations. Don’t recognize the name? Richard was formerly the chief technology officer at Lucasfilm, where he was named one of Variety’s “Top 10 innovators to Watch,” and before that he was a senior director of developer relations for a little company called Apple. That’s quite a pedigree — and Richard told the crowd here that he views developers as his primary customers, so it’s clear he’ll be working hard to win their favor. That said, we think he’s got quite a challenge evangelizing developers to support a platform that won’t have compelling new products out for months — let’s all wish him luck.

Former Lucasfilm CTO Richard Kerris takes over as head of webOS developer relations originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Feb 2011 22:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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To say we’re expecting big things from HP and Palm at tomorrow’s webOS “Think Beyond” event would be a huge understatement: not only has the company strongly hinted at a family of new mobile products, it’s even playfully called us out for leaking the Topaz tablet as seen in the invite above, and released a very intriguing teaser video.

Update: Palm’s website has been taken over by a countdown and the teaser video, and “Think Ahead” has been added as a tagline — perhaps hinting at a tease of future products? We’ll find out soon enough.

Of course, we’ll be there live to cover it all when the event starts at 10:00AM PST — and you’ll find our liveblog at this link at the following local times:

07:00AM – Hawaii
10:00AM – Pacific
11:00AM – Mountain
12:00PM – Central
01:00PM – Eastern
06:00PM – London
07:00PM – Paris
09:00PM – Moscow
11:30PM – Mumbai
03:00AM – Tokyo (February 10th)
05:00AM – Sydney (February 10th)

See you then!

Reminder: HP / Palm’s webOS ‘Think Beyond’ event is tomorrow (update: the countdown is on!) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Feb 2011 19:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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