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    HomeGadgetsMiscellaneous GadgetsHP CEO says he didn’t buy Palm for Smartphones

    HP CEO says he didn’t buy Palm for Smartphones

    “We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business.” Those were words the of HP CEO Mark Hurd as he spoke to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch technology summit on Wednesday.

    Hurd said that theory that HP was going to throw money into developing new smartphones featuring webOS “doesn’t in any way make any sense.” So why on earth did HP buy Palm? Patents. Owning the rights to webOS and Palm’s collection of patents means HP will easily and affordably be able to create a unified experience across the “tens of millions of HP small form factor web-connected devices”, including but not limited to printers and tablets. Here’s the quote:

    HP CEO says he didn_t buy Palm for smartphones

    “We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business. And I tell people that, but it doesn’t seem to resonate well. We bought it for the IP. The WebOS is one of the two ground-up pieces of software that is built as a web operating environment […] We have tens of millions of HP small form factor web-connected devices […] Now imagine that being a web-connected environment where now you can get a common look and feel and a common set of services laid against that environment. That is a very value proposition.”

    Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) Family

    We appreciate the candor HP, but honestly, that is way to strong of a statement.  You pretty much took a dump on Palm and its future handsets, and instead are concentrating on the HP namebrand, which really never had a good name in the smart phone arena in the first place.

    Furthermore, smartphones ARE THE FUTURE!.  Why desparage it by talking about web-connected environments and not about hardware and WebOS itself, a tremendous mobile OS, which has gotten a bad rap due to its debut carrier it chose, Sprint, perhaps some aesthetics, and obviously the lack of a robust App store.  Other than that, I could go out on a limb and say that at WebOS’s core, it is hands down the best mobile OS out there.

    Published on June 7, 2010


    David Novak
    David Novakhttps://www.gadgetgram.com
    For the last 20 years, David Novak has appeared in newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV around the world, reviewing the latest in consumer technology. His byline has appeared in Popular Science, PC Magazine, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Electronic House Magazine, GQ, Men’s Journal, National Geographic, Newsweek, Popular Mechanics, Forbes Technology, Readers Digest, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Glamour Magazine, T3 Technology Magazine, Stuff Magazine, Maxim Magazine, Wired Magazine, Laptop Magazine, Indianapolis Monthly, Indiana Business Journal, Better Homes and Garden, CNET, Engadget, InfoWorld, Information Week, Yahoo Technology and Mobile Magazine. He has also made radio appearances on the The Mark Levin Radio Show, The Laura Ingraham Talk Show, Bob & Tom Show, and the Paul Harvey RadioShow. He’s also made TV appearances on The Today Show and The CBS Morning Show. His nationally syndicated newspaper column called the GadgetGUY, appears in over 100 newspapers around the world each week, where Novak enjoys over 3 million in readership. David is also a contributing writer fro Men’s Journal, GQ, Popular Mechanics, T3 Magazine and Electronic House here in the U.S.

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