HP Ends the Tease: WebOS Smartphones Set for 2011

Earlier this year, Hewlett-Packard paid $1.2 billion to buy Palm, a deal that was expected to result eventually in a line of products based on Palm's coveted WebOS mobile operating system. Up to this point, though, the company has played coy about its plans. No longer.

At a technology conference in Barcelona, HP's senior vice president Eric Cado said today that the company intended to introduce new phones early in 2011.

The debut of a smartphone would fill that proverbial gaping hole in HP's product mix. Of late, the rumor mill has also carried word of a possible PalmPad tablet device said to be headed to the market early next year. Industry buzz also has it that HP is working on a smartphone device with an 800x480 screen that would have no physical keypad.

The WebOS features a graphical user interface and was specifically designed by Palm for devices with touchscreens. It was the operating system platform that Palm used for its Pre and Pixi phones. But despite some success, Palm wasn't able to turn WebOS into a big hit. With the technology now belonging to HP, the expectation is that WebOS will become a stronger competitor. During a summer conference hosted by Fortune Jon Rubenstein, Palm's former CEO and now with HP, indicated the plan was to put the operating system on a myriad computing platforms.

""We're working a wide variety, as Todd (Bradley) said,...slates, netbooks, working with the guys in the printer group. webOS [...] will have a unified user interface across all of these, will have a unified developer environment, and it's all based on the foundation that we build in webOS from day one. When we developed webOS, we thought about making this scalable across a variety of mobile devices; that's what we'll be delivering going forward."