Hewlett-Packard says now that its $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm (NASDAQ:PALM) is complete, it's moving full steam ahead with plans to release products based on Palm's webOS platform.
Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, Todd Bradley, executive vice president of the personal systems group division of HP, said that the company will be releasing multiple tablet products later this year.
"I think you'll see us with a family of slate products, clearly a Microsoft product in the enterprise and a webOS product broadly-deployed," Bradley said. "Slates are going to be an enormous category, this is just in its infancy." The new tablets will join a host of others running on Google's Android platform as handset and computer makers alike try to capitalize on the success Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has found with its iPad; Apple said this week that it sold 3.27 million iPads in its latest quarter.
Former Palm CEO Job Rubinstein, who now is a member of HP's executive team, also said that webOS 2.0, a refreshed version of the company's highly-praised operating system, is on track for later this year, according to Engadget. Additionally, he said that Palm is aggressively working on new hardware.
HP CEO Mark Hurd said in an interview with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine that HP wants to focus on developing mobile phone hardware now that it has acquired webOS. However, he said that the company will continue to emphasize the corporate HP brand above all else, and that Palm might fade into the background as a "sub-brand," similar to HP Pavilion computers.
For more:
- see this Engadget post
- see this Fortune article
- see this Engadget post
- see this Frankfurter Allgemeine article (via Google translation)
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