According to a DigiTimes report by Yen-Shyang Hwang and Willie Teng, “HP will adopt the WebOS platform in smartphones and tablets, according to Monty Wong, vice president of personal computing systems group at HP Taiwan.”
“HP will announce more details after the completion of the Palm acquisition at the end of July, Wong said,” Hwang and Teng report. “[Wong added that] the HP Slate will hit the market before the end of the fiscal year ending in October.”
The full, but very brief article, is here.
[Attribution: Ars Technica. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Silverwarloc” for the heads up.]
October will be too late!
bring it on, reanimate the corpse, and hope the zombie OS prods apple into continued innovation due to (face)palm continuing to try to eat its brains
As a mac fan I think this is good. I am all about healthy competition. I also thinks this shows that companies are starting to realize that the era of windows is over.
So they’re still releasing the Slate? That’s the W7 version?
What is that I hear? The chatter of chairs coming from up North?
Apple will have sold several million by the time HP is ready to show off their iPad killer / Windows netbook killer / HP flat thing. To late to the party. This is Apple’s market now.
HP can make printers that work with the iPad maybe?
is-late
but better than never, eh?
I guess HP thinks they have enough engineering talent to give Apple a challenging competitor. But let’s face it, they’re going to be trying to figure out how to get around all those Apple patents and iPhone OS 4 developers’ innovations. Ain’t gonna happen. Looks like a doomed effort to me from the screen of my iPad.
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6 months ago, that monkey was dancing on stage with a “Slate”.
M$’s PC partners showing *zero* respect for Ballmer’s image.
Do not outright believe DigiTimes. They are usually 99% wrong.
Better that than another stupid machine infected with Windows.
What is going on with all Microsoft “Parthners”? Why are they turning their back to Microsoft? Just because Micrsoft betrayed them before?
Maybe HP will attempt a cheaper solution using WebOS and netbook innards so that it doesnt compete head on with Apple. A difficult trick to pull off but MS left without a major client in HP.
Maybe they learned from the “plays For Sure” fiasco.
Maybe they remember Ballamer’s statement about his stratagey and THEY (HP) did not like it a lot.
So, Microsoft may have to goto the low end of the market for a bit, while they figure out the word “Innovation.”
Copy the have down pat!
Well good luck with that!
I’m loving seeing Micro$oft being given the cold shoulder by phone companies and computer companies lately. It will be a shame if Ballmer is ousted after Apple overtakes them in market cap. He might be replaced by someone who’s actually competent at tech, and not just a marketer.
HP made the right decision, what remains to be seen is if HP can actually write some code and make the OS work. I haven’t seen much from HP in the software development arena that gives me hope it can develop good printer software and scanner interfaces, let alone OSes.
They are in the right direction. The Browser is the platform of the future. The apps will equally run on Win, Mac, Linux…
It’s time to unify all platforms.
@diskgrinder
Igor… It’s Alive…. It’s Alive….. It’s ALIVE!!!!
The monster lives… grab your pitchforks and torches.
This can’t be good news for the Redmond Furniture Factory, especially as AAPL is only a tad over $5B behind.
Yet another indicator of the inevitable and graceless decline of M$ into irrelevance. Sublime
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=:~)
HP will have to invest at least another billion dollars over the next several years to merely bring the WebOS platform/ecosystem up to where Apple’s iPhone OS platform/ecosystem is now. That is assuming they can find the large number of hyper talented people needed to do this work. They got some talent with Palm but not nearly enough to do it in the time frame required. Even then they will be skating to where the puck has been rather than where it is going to be. I agree having their own operating system is theoretically the way to go, but the task of successfully competing with Apple/Google in the mobile internet space seems to be HP’s impossible dream. This seems to be an all-in bet for HP now, though, without a backup plan. They may be saying, “if I can’t make it with my own OS, then I don’t want to do it at all.” I wonder who would win at Texas Hold Em? Hurd or Jobs?
Can’t imagine HP can adapt WebOS for a tablet, much less getting it to run on whatever hardware the old Slate was designed on, in such a short time. Plus no tablet optimized apps.
With JJ on this. Whether WebOS is good enough, or better than iPad OS 4.0, Apple needs some healthy competition here.
You have none and you get rusty. Bring it on HP. We all win.
@ Future Media “They’re going to be trying to figure out how to get around all those Apple patents”.
Purchase of Palm gave HP a healthy stash of patents with which to fend off Apple. There’s clear violation both ways.
Until it can run real apps, WebOS has zero future.
On the otherhand, both WinMo and Windows(that’s right) have zero future, period, as well as licensing fees out the ass. So I guess this is ultimately a win for HP.
And hopefully it’ll inspire PC manufacturers to increasingly distance themselves from Windows until they finally abandon it completely and replace it with their own damn Unix-based operating system(s). Which is what they’ll have to do sooner or later anyway if they want to live.