Though the company was at one point in development of Android products, it has now shifted completely to webOS.
Jon Rubinestein, the former CEO of Palm, which HP (HPQ) picked up for $1.2 billion earlier this year, dispelled any myths of multiple portable operating systems happening at HP to the Financial Times today. Specifically, he said there wouldn’t be any Windows Mobile and HP killed off its Android efforts:
HP is on track to deliver a tablet computer running webOS early next year, as well as a Windows-based tablet that will ship sooner, he said. It has abandoned a project to launch a smartphone based on Google’s Android open source operating system and there will be no tablet based on the system, Mr Rubinstein said.
The bad news for Rubinstein is that HP released an Android tablet as part of a printer package just last week. The bad news for HP’s customers is that that product is likely to be orphaned as HP moves its printers to the webOS. HP VP (and likely CEO successor to Mark Hurd) Todd Bradley said this week that he expected to sell 15 million WebOS printers next year.
He also let slip the name PalmPad for HP’s line of webOS tablets.
We’ll have a webOS-powered PalmPad that will be set for release early in 2011.
HP will also be competing with Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL) for Music sales according to the FT:
One early cloud service to be aimed at consumers will be a system for streaming music to multiple devices. “As we roll out PCs to folks, we can give them opportunities to store and upload music to the cloud,” Mr McArthur said.
The music will be streamed to HP’s smartphones, which will also store the most listened-to songs on the gadget for faster playback.
Something tells me that this doesn’t keep Steve Jobs up at night.
