Woo?
Should we be excited?
Call me up when the finally see the error of their ways and come up with a Android tablet...
HP's attempt to out-iPad the iPad will indeed be based on Palm's WebOS, a company executive has revealed. Alleged insiders have said as much already, but this is the first time a staffer has gone on record with the information. According to Monty Wong, VP of PCs at HP's Taiwan operation, WebOS will be used in smartphones and …
Surely with low-margin devices, owning your own OS has got to to the advantage of your bottom line over paying a third party (ie Microsoft).
And to those above making derogatory comments about WebOS - have you actually used it? it's quite possibly the finest of the current crop of smartphone UIs from a design and usability perspective, and it runs on a sufficiently vanilla build of linux that you can run desktop linux apps with a bit of tweaking ( http://www.geekword.net/openoffice-on-palm-pre/ ).
They can use a far cheaper CPU (ARM) which has far lower power draw than the Atom hence smaller battery. Plus, having ditched Windows they need to provide much less memory (primary and secondary) and don't need to worry about also providing enough "juice" to cover the additional needs of a real time virus scanner.
With all these savings it is quite conceivable to make a device that is smaller, lighter, cheaper and more usable than could ever be imagined on the Wintel platform.