Mark Sullivan:
Palm Chief Executive Jon Rubinstein told the Web 2.0 Conference that his company lost some momentum after it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in April. But Palm will get its mojo back, he says, thanks in part to a host of WebOS devices including smartphones, tablets, and devices he “can’t talk about yet.”
I’ve always been fond of webOS. I do wish that Palm would have been able to release another couple of handsets by now, but unfortunately that wasn’t in the cards. The folks at Palm have been hard at work developing the recently released webOS 2.0 and are actively working on new devices.
I’m happy that they are working on new handsets and other unmentioned gadgets, but I’m actually more excited about the prospect of a webOS tablet. Simply because there isn’t really any good competition for the iPad. There’s the Samsung Galaxy Tab, but as Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan put it, it’s “a pocketable train wreck.”
Palm and HP could have a winner with webOS on a tablet. They’ll be late to market when compared to many Android tablets, but webOS has something that Android doesn’t, a short list of devices for developers to target. It’s kind of sad to think that the availability of a large number of handsets could be it’s biggest fault.