“There’s nothing new,” he told AllThingsD in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “And many look the same. If you covered up the label on them, you can’t tell them apart.”

Ultrabooks, in case you’ve missed the ultra-noisy hype this week, are Intel-driven lightweight laptops, with Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Acer getting into the game, to name a handful. In addition to portability, some computer makers are punching up the laptops with features like carbon fiber and Gorilla Glass coatings, flexible bodies, NFC chips and battery boosters.

“At the end of the day, they have Intel chips; they’re running Microsoft Windows operating systems,” McKinney said. He pointed to the HP Voodoo Envy 133, which hit the market in 2008, had a 13.3-inch display and weighed only 3.4 pounds (albeit at a $2,000-plus price point).

McKinney was attending CES as a member of the press — he’s writing a column for Forbes. He was also promoting his upcoming book, “Beyond the Obvious.”

McKinney exited HP last fall, following a tumultuous couple of months that included a CEO swap, the abandonment of webOS hardware, and reports that HP might spin off its PC unit. During McKinney’s nine years at the PC maker, he guided much of the company’s innovation and R&D. More recently, that included the development of Ultrabooks, he said.

McKinney also offered his thoughts on webOS, which HP acquired with Palm back in 2010, and which recently became an open source project. “I was disappointed by the decision to kill the hardware. I still think, though, there’s a lot of life left in webOS,” he said.

He hears from developers and tinkerers, he said, who are still excited to work with webOS, but are waiting for the code, the access and the governance model from HP in order to really begin developing on the platform.

“Ultimately, I think webOS could become the alternative OS that you can download on devices that come with another operating system built in,” McKinney said. “Apps from developers are continuing to grow for webOS. The interest is still there.”

(Photo courtesy of the DEMO Conference/Flickr)

MORE CES NEWS:

• Complete coverage
• HP’s Former CTO: Ultrabooks Are Nothing New, webOS Still Has Life Yet
• Walt Shows Off CES Gadgets for Fox Business News (Video)
• What Kind of Web Video Plans Does Sony Have? (Video)
• Fujitsu Seeking Way Into Crowded U.S. Smartphone Market
• Why Rhapsody Is (Probably) Bigger Than Spotify — In the U.S.
• Microsoft Beefing Up CeBit Presence Even as It Pulls Back on CES
• Inside the CES Lost & Found
• FCC Chairman Has New Tablet, but Same Script: More Spectrum!
• Verizon Wireless: We Want to Connect Five Devices for Every Subscriber
• Ultrabooks From HP and Lenovo That Are (Kinda, Sorta) Different
• Walt and Katie Take a Tour of CES (Video)
• Schmidt-Storm Alert: The Google Chairman Didn’t Like Your Question
• T-Mobile Expands Bobsled Messaging Service
• Intel Shows Just How It Plans to Get Into Phones (Video)
• Motorola CEO: We’re Going to Release Fewer Phones This Year
• Kinect Helps Keep Aging Xbox at the Top of Its Game
• More From T-Mobile CEO: On Pricing, LTE and That Ever-Elusive iPhone
• Exclusive: New Boss Acknowledges Windows Phone Still Has “Awareness Problem”
• And You Thought Jawbone UP Was Going to Miss the CES Party!
• Interview: T-Mobile CEO Says No Second AT&T Deal Out There
• Grover Is at CES and I Am Missing It
• BlueStacks Bringing Android Apps to Windows 8
• Why the Future of TV Won’t Be Here Soon
• Nvidia’s Tegra 3 Tries to Save Battery in All Sorts of Different Ways
• Dynamic Dual Coverage: Ballmer’s Last Act in Vegas and the BCS Championship in 3-D
• Microsoft Phoning In Its Last CES Keynote
• Myspace — Yes, Myspace — Says It’s Going to Sell You Web TV
• Samsung Unveils “Super” 55-Inch OLED TV
• Nokia Unveils That LTE Windows Phone It’s Been Dying to Share
• Steve Ballmer Gives Ralph De La Vega a Very … Vigorous Greeting (Video)
• Interview: AT&T’s De La Vega on LTE, Tablets and Life After T-Mobile
• AT&T’s De La Vega: Shared Data Plans Still in the Works
• LG: 55-Inch Glasses-Free 3-D Screen Is on the Way
• LG Pushes 4G Smartphone Through Verizon: The LG Spectrum
• Live: AT&T’s Vegas Act Stars LTE and, Making Her Return to the Stage, Nokia
• CES Notebook: The Constant Search for Power and Vegas’ Worst-kept Secret
• Belkin Bringing Mobile TV to Lots of Cellphones, Will Anyone Tune In?
• Acer Introduces “World’s Thinnest” Ultrabook and a “Me-Too” Cloud Service
• There Better Be Some Cool Stuff at CES, Because CE Holiday Sales Data Bytes!
• CES 2012: Snooki and Bieber Are In, Gaga Is Out!
• Coming to a Smartphone Near You: Gorilla Glass 2
• RIM Hopes Next PlayBook OS Will Impress at CES
• Ultrabooks, the Ultra-Fancy New Name for Laptops
• At CES, Expect More Gadgets Telling You to Get Off the Couch
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Microsoft Pulling Out of CES After Upcoming Show
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Dell Will Drop the Flashy Vegas Act for CES This Year
• Ultrabook Conga Line Preps for CES 2012

Earlier today, I announced that I will be retiring from HP.

This is not the traditional retirement. I’m not planning on spending my days playing golf or sitting around the house driving my wife crazy. I have far too much passion, energy and ideas to sit on the sidelines.

My definition of retirement is the freedom to write, speak, mentor, advise and teach without the restrictions of the traditional employee/corporate structure.

My passion is to help innovators get better at innovating and I’ve spent the better part of the last dozen years fulfilling that mission. My time at HP started out as an advisor on innovation that turned into a request to join for a year or so to “help grow the innovation culture at HP”. That was 9 years ago. I can honestly say they I’ve done everything that is within my power to fulfill that objective.

In helping grow the innovation culture at HP, I had the privilege to mentor, be a part of and lead teams that delivered some amazing innovations including: Blackbird, Firebird, Envy 133, Gabble, Twynergy, Pluribus, Vantage TouchWall, DreamScreen and many more.

These innovations were the catalyst for HP making it on to the Most Creative Company lists for the first time. The innovation teams at HP deserve the recognition.

So what am I going to do after HP?

Repeat what I did at HP by helping others get better at innovation.

In the near term, I will be focusing on the launch of my first book, Beyond The Obvious. At the same time, I will be expanding my efforts on the blog, podcast, speaking and teaching Killer Innovation Workshops.

I’m also excited that once again, I will be able to take on board seats, advisory roles and mentoring opportunities since I will no longer have to worry about conflict of interest and other corporate restrictions.

HP has asked me to stay on through a transition period and to ensure that a number of customer obligations are completed. I anticipate that my last official day at HP will be 12/31.

But HP thinks it can automate the process a bit further. The company has a new app, called Twynergy, that can look at a user and associate him or her with various topics. Twynergy, designed for HP’s WebOS, made its public debut over the weekend when it was shown off in a speech by PC unit CTO Phil McKinney, appearing at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif.

“It’s all about taking your Twitter feed and discerning areas of interest,” McKinney said. The app doesn’t just create a word tag, but also looks at the content on sites that are linked to in tweets.

Twynergy can also be used to compare two profiles to see how similar they are. For instance, McKinney noted that he and Howard Stern only have 2 percent overlap.

“That’s a good thing,” he told a crowd attending Maker Faire, an annual Silicon Valley event that is something of a cross between a science fair and a county fair.

McKinney said that he and Oprah shared 7 percent, while he had roughly 50 percent overlap with motivational speaker Tony Robbins. As for the celebrity with whom he had the most in common, McKinney said he was surprised to see it was President Barack Obama, with 86 percent similarity.

McKinney also used his talk with the crowd of Maker Faire hackers to show off Palm’s TouchPad WebOS tablet, due to ship this summer, controlling a fan and lamp and monitoring temperature, all wirelessly. McKinney said that HP needs the help of all the “makers” out there to develop cool apps.

Finally, McKinney also used his Maker Faire appearance to kick off a new effort to develop tools to aid those with autism. HP and its advertising agency, Goodby Silverstein, are kicking off a project called Hacking Autism, aiming at summoning more people to develop technology to aid those with autism. The effort will include an October “hack-a-thon” in Silicon Valley aimed at getting some ideas under way.

McKinney noted that 1 in 100 people are now born with autism in the U.S. In Silicon Valley, the rate is more like 1 in 80. “It’s a full blown epidemic,” he said.

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.”

A morning slate of panels centered on “The Ever-Changing Tech Sector,” and one of the participants illustrated a huge technology trend with a hum-drum example – lost cell phones.

“In the average month, 10,000 cell phones are left in taxicabs in Chicago,” said Phil McKinney, vice president and CTO, personal systems group, Hewlett-Packard. “[People] aren’t using four-digit passwords either.”

The reason it’s more than just an inconvenience is that the space between the personal and the work-related is quickly collapsing when it comes to device use.

McKinney says employees – particularly younger ones – no longer differentiate between personal use and work use for their mobile phones and other devices. But that brings with it a set of challenges in the area of data security, as employees increasingly want their work information on their personal cell phones.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

This according to HP’s (HPQ) defacto webOS evangelist Rahul Sood, who says we’ll see the first fruits of the HP-Palm union in the year ahead. “…Over the next 12 months we will see the makings of a new portfolio and the beginning of something great again,” Sood said this week. “There are great things to come that fit multiple types of consumers. Over time you will see the community grow. You will see app developers flock to HP as they jockey for position in the catalog. All of this may sound like a dream but it’s completely attainable.”

Figuring prominently in that dream, webOS 2.0–scheduled to be released later this year, and a slate (or “PalmPad“) that will run it. As I’ve reported here before, the latter is expected at market sometime in early 2011. According to Phil McKinney, CTO for HP’s Personal Systems Group, that’s still a hard date.

When attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, BoomTown moderated what turned out to be a fascinating panel discourse of what was to come in the tech sector.

No, it was not a gathering of Trekkies.

The CES SuperSession panel, titled “What Will They Think of Next? Consumer Technology in 2025,” was less Jules Verne than a logical analysis of where gadgetry is headed by looking at both the past and the present.

Overall consensus: Touch screens everywhere, 3-D imaging in wide use, no device wires, ubiquitous high-speed wireless networks and more.

Of course, there were some edgier ideas, like being able to tell exactly when it is going to rain to the minute, via massive computing of weather patterns.

In addition, one of the panelists, Greg Harper, brought back what was popular in 1994, the same number of years back that 2025 is forward. Yep, he dragged out for display the Apple (AAPL) Newton and brick-sized cellphones.

The panelists were: Stephen DiFranco, VP and GM, Americas Consumer Group, Lenovo; Gregory Harper, co-founder, Gadgetoff and president, Cerberus; Len J. Lauer, EVP and COO, Qualcomm (QCOM); Sean Maloney, EVP and GM, Sales and Marketing, Intel (INTC); and Phil McKinney, VP and CTO, Personal Systems Group, Hewlett-Packward (HPQ).

Here’s the video with interviews about 2025 with all of them–and don’t miss the very funny poster at the end from Microsoft (MSFT) about its vision of the future: