Following its recent acquisition of mobile device manufacturer Palm, HP is busy working on a ‘PalmPad’ tablet device of its own and aims to ship sometime next year.
HP recently filed a trademark application for PalmPad and will be using the WebOS (created for the Palm Pre smartphone) to run a HP tablet computing device.
“You’ll see us with a Microsoft product in the near future, and a webOS-based product in early 2011,” said Todd Bradley, head of HP’s personal systems group, during the quarterly earnings call last week.
The PalmPad, however, will not interfere with plans to release a Windows 7-based tablet device before the year is out. This particular HP gadget is called the Slate and was demoed by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the CES show in January.
Then in March HP released video previews of the slate in action with HP’s VP and chief technology officer Phil McKinney promising: “No watered-down internet, no sacrifices.”
“With this Slate product, you’re getting a full web-browsing experience in the palm of your hand,” he added.
The WebOS is a relatively new mobile operating system developed by Palm and released in June 2009 for the Palm Pre smartphone. It replaced the previous Palm OS and Windows Mobile OS that Palm devices including the Palm Treo Pro were running on.
