HP Netbooks and Tablets To Feature WebOS

HP have completed the acquisition of mobile phone company, Palm, for a price of $1.2 billion, with a per share price of $5.70. The chairman and chief executive of Palm, Jon Rubenstein, will now be reporting to Todd Bradley, the executive vice president of personal systems group, HP. The next venture of the laptop making giant is to release netbooks and tablets based on Palm’s award winning mobile operating system, the WebOS. In-fact, HP’s main motive behind the Palm-acquisition was the WebOS. Currently, the Palm’s OS is running on the Palm Pre, the Palm Pre Plus, the Palm Pixi and the Palm Pixi Plus.

Apart from HP netbooks and tablets, the company will still be continuing the development of Palm smartphones, which will also feature the WebOS. HP netbooks and tablet (Slate) had earlier adopted Microsoft’s Windows OS. While netbooks fared well with Microsoft’s operating system, the tablet did not. The Windows 7 OS was not very tablet-friendly. Even Microsoft’s own tablet, the Microsoft Courier had been killed before it could make it to the markets. The HP Slate too, which was announced at CES this year, had not seen market shelves yet. It will reportedly be doing so, with the WebOS running on it, instead of Windows 7.

The WebOS has features like:-

• Multi-tasking. A quality that earned the iPad plenty of negative criticism, for lacking it.
• It is touch-friendly. It had specifically been designed for devices with a touchscreen.
• It includes a suite of apps for management of personal information.
• It is web friendly as well.

While the tablets seem to have a benefit in using the WebOS, it remains to see how this OS will fare on netbooks.