In a quarterly earnings announcement yesterday, HP Chairman and CEO Mark Hurd revealed plans to utilize the WebOS platform from the recently acquired Palm on both printers and tablet devices.
Following poor sales of their latest line of handsets Palm had been engaged in talks with numerous potential buyers for a number of months before eventually selling to HP.
The WebOS platform takes technologies commonly used to create sites on the web and adopts the same technology for a desktop environment, opening up the development to a host of individuals and companies already developing online.
Mark Hurd had this to say:
“After closing the acquisition we expect to leverage WebOS in the apps store beyond smartphones… such as slates and web connected printers.”
So whilst it’s still early days it’s looking like HP is planning on going with the WebOS platform over the Windows 7 OS that was due to be rolled out on the, now cancelled, Slate and just maybe WebOS will manage to go mainstream after all.
