HP to decide future of webOS this week. Will hold an all-hands meeting tomorrow.

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.

According to  AppleInsider  HP is rumored to have finished the initial bidding process for its webOS unit and will hold an all-hands meeting tomorrow that may reveal its future plans for selling or spinning off the group, according to people familiar with the company's plans.

HP appeared to be clearly uninterested in investing the capital needed to launch webOS as a major competitor to Apple's iOS, Google's Android, RIM's BlackBerry OS and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platforms; such a task would be very difficult even if HP made it a company priority.

While webOS is now largely finished and its hardware was ready to sell, HP's cancelation of the hardware side of the equation, motivated by dismal sales, means that a spinoff of Palm would result in a return to square one for the group, forcing it to formulate a new licensing business in a market where even Microsoft has had a very difficult time assembling a viable ecosystem of mobile licensees.

That makes the most likely outcome for webOS a direct sale to a third party (such as Amazon) that wants to own its own mobile environment without having to start from scratch. 

HP's PSG has also completed work on the Enyo development framework for webOS, which could be used by either an existing mobile platform or by a software vendor to create web-based software for existing platforms.

Source: AppleInsider

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Rumor: Amazon is a one click on the shopping cart for HP webOS ?

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.

VentureBeat is reporting that a well-placed source tells them that HP is currently looking to rid itself of Palm as soon as possible, and that Amazon is the closest to finalizing the deal, among a handful of contenders.

"It also appears that HP has been eyeing Amazon for some time as a potential webOS partner. In an interview with This is my next in July, Rubinstein revealed quite a bit about having Amazon use webOS in its future tablets:

 So, we’d like a partner that would allow us to expand the webOS ecosystem… There’s a variety of different sets of a characteristics to qualify as a good partner. I would say Amazon would certainly make a great partner, because they have a lot of characteristics that would help them expand the webOS ecosystem. As to whether there’s been discussions or not… that’s obviously not something I’m going to comment about.

HP paid $1.2 billion for Palm in 2010, but Amazon will end up spending a fraction of that if the deal goes through. Given just how badly the TouchPad failed, HP will likely offer what’s left of Palm at a major discount, especially since Amazon woudn’t be interested in resuscitating now extinct webOS hardware. "

Source: VentureBeat 

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