HP Will Put Palm Print on Windows PCs

Finally, a bit of clarity on Hewlett-Packard’s plans to “drastically expand” its webOS operating system to the PC and their implications for Microsoft. HP may be going all-in with webOS, but not to the eventual exclusion of Windows.

HP CTO Phil McKinney says the company is working on bringing an integrated webOS experience to the PC. “There’s a huge user base that still wants the [Windows] PC,” he told the Seattle Times. “The key is that even on their PCs, people want to have it integrated with their devices. We have our PCs, you have your pads, you’ve got your phones. How do they work together? In today’s world they all act as individual information islands. What webOS does is bring all that together.”

In other words, HP isn’t dumping Windows, it’s enhancing it–at least for now. A wise move, since the former would be suicide at this point, even though it’s unclear how HP will pull it off. McKinney said the integration will not be done via virtualization, but rather through “a combination of taking the existing operating systems and bringing webOS onto those platforms and making it universal across all of our footprint.”

KenG

The machine I want to build (if I was insane enough to get into the PC business) is an x86 windows PC that uses a Tegra or similar multi-core ARM as a graphics subsystem. The Tegra would run Android (or in HP’s case, WebOS) and have its own filesystem. When running windows apps, the ARM subsystem would appear no different than any other graphics controller, but when you run Android or WebOS apps on the ARM, those apps cannot infect the windows filesystem. And the x86 can sit in standby mode, using far less power.

Oh, and I would use SSD instead of HDD. If you have to store that much data, buy a USB or eSATA drive. Or hang one on your network. And this box should be no taller than a Mac mini. What percentage of windows users install PCI cards these days (and for those, build one of those towers).
http://blog.macb.net macbeach

When I used the early Palm products (went through 4 of them) the one thing that remained the same was the PC interface. You could not run Palm applications on the PC, but you COULD update all aspects of the device (add or edit contacts, set or check schedules, make notes, organize notes and so on). I could go for days without synching my device because I was accessing the information at my desk most of the time anyway.

By the time Palm in their infinite wisdom told the old OS user to pound sand I had long since stopped using the Palm device at all and in fact continued to use the (third party open source) version of the program written for Linux.

Business users by choice or not are using Outlook to keep track of such things and it will take sticks of dynamite to dislodge them.

Except for individuals who are seeing the advantages of having this information online (and not necessarily on corporate servers) any new tools are going to face the ongoing nightmare of secretive and buggy Microsoft APIs to synch data between devices and the desktop. Amazingly, only the Microsoft/Nokia devices will pull off this stunt properly.

Those who have the freedom to do so will instead chose between the Apple OS and Android with a web interface for the desktop (at least for Android), leaving HP to, well, search for the leftovers.
Anonymous

HP is probably doing on the PCs what they SHOULD have done in the first place – hire a company like Teal Software (of webOS-mimicking TealOS GUI fame) to make a GUI that works on top of an existing OS. Instead of more than a billion dollars they could have spent a couple hundred million and had the exact same end-user-experience result.

HP Will Put Palm Print on Windows PCs

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