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.”

The two companies’ arrangement has been stagnant for some time now, and while it’s not clear what exactly brought it to an end, it seems reasonable to assume that the retailer’s exclusion from a series of distribution deals that brought the iPhone and iPad to Target and Wal-Mart may have had something to do with it.

When Sprint CEO Dan Hesse joined the company three years ago, the third-largest carrier was bleeding subscribers from having a poor reputation for customer service and facing stiff competition from the likes of AT&T, which holds the exclusive on the iPhone.

Since then, Sprint has stemmed the losses, mostly by beefing up its customer service and by investing in the prepaid sector to attract a wider audience during the economic downturn. Going forward, Sprint looks to its 4G strategy for growth through its ownership stake in WiMax-provider Clearwire. Next up, Hesse joins Walt Mossberg onstage.

3:45 pm: Walt welcomes Dan Hesse to the stage. You can’t have mobile without networks, says Walt. You’ve led the way on 4G; tell us about it.

3:46 pm: Dan: We are getting San Francisco up soon, and will have 120 million POPs by the end of the year, or about a third of the country.

He explains what 4G is: 3G for was email and Web pages, but 4G is for multimedia and video.

The best analogy is that 4G is the wide open freeway vs. an interstate that provides the same speeds, but you have to stop along the way.

3:48 pm: Walt: Why are you using WiMax when the two other carriers are using LTE?

Hesse: Back in 2008, we wanted to be first, and WiMax was available right now. (Lots to do with TDD, and other technical mumbo jumbo). Technically, there’s no difference. I can’t deny that LTE will be a bigger ecosystem, but we couldn’t wait. We thought the market was ready.

With the success of the iPhone, we thought it was ready now.

Walt: How much leadership did it give you?

Hesse: Well, it made Verizon move a lot faster….In 2010, we’ll have 120 million POPs, and the EVO and Epic (two 4G phones) have been really successful.

Walt: How successful?

Hesse: If you were to go to Clearwire’s wholesale numbers, you should think of Sprint’s lion’s share of the wholesale numbers.

Walt: Was it worth the investment?

Hesse: I think so.

3:53 pm: Hesse: 4G is one element of many.

Walt: You like Consumer Reports, unlike the guy here earlier [AT&T's Glenn Lurie].

Hesse: Sprint is the fastest growing brand of postpaid in the U.S.–not the Nextel brand, where we’ve been losing subscribers.

3:55 pm: Walt: Are you going to get the iPhone?

Hesse: Can’t say.

Walt: Would you like the iPhone?

Hesse: Under the right conditions, yes, I would. It’s a wonderful phone.

3:56 pm: Backing up a bit, Walt now asks about an industry trend toward tiered pricing for data plans, where the more you use, the more you pay.

Sprint hasn’t yet limited users’ traffic.

Hesse: Customers will pay a premium for simplicity. Even if it’s not in their best economic interest, they will go with the unlimited plan. We were the first to come out with truly unlimited text, voice and data with the Simply Everything plan.

3:59 pm: Walt: Are you not going to do tiered pricing?

Hesse: So far, we aren’t, he says, which gets a round of applause from the audience. But Sprint did up the cost of the unlimited plans of the most capable devices on the network.

4:00 pm: Walt: Unlimited means unlimited or doesn’t it?

Hesse: No, it doesn’t. What if they have the SlingBox streaming 24×7?

4:01 pm: Hesse: The trend is toward one plan for all of your devices, like tablets, phones, PCs, etc.

Walt: Are you going to offer plans for all those devices?

Hesse: We are thinking about it. That’s the next step to simplicity. Three years ago, it was about one device.

4:02 pm: Walt: People aren’t counting minutes, now they are counting megabytes and things people don’t understand.

Hesse: Something has to give; what’s going to be the form? Do you have meters, do you have tiers, do you increase the price of the unlimited plans?

Another option is to have a lot more spectrum available to add capacity at a lower cost.

Walt: Are you talking about taking away the spectrum that the elderly use to watch their TV?

Hesse: If more spectrum is available, you can use more frequencies, which is a lot less expensive than splitting cell sites and putting in more towers.

Walt: There’s some confusion about Clearwire. They are opening stores and selling laptops and modems. You own most of that company, and they are building your WiMax network. Why are they competing with you?

Hesse: I have a wholesale business that resells minutes to Leap, so it’s the same thing.

4:06 pm: Walt’s giving Hesse grief about the structure of the Clearwire deal. Despite Sprint owning roughly 54 percent of the company, Sprint doesn’t control the board.

Walt: Who did that deal?

Hesse: Two thumbs pointing at himself [me]. When you have this many owners of the company, we can’t agree.

4:08 pm: Walt: What’s the value of 4G?

Hesse: The experience is really fast, and we offer unlimited plans on 4G. There’s a five-gigabyte cap on 3G, but 4G is completely unlimited.

Walt’s curious if 4G is really life-changing and transformative. Sprint’s beating the other guys by 2x, not 10x or 20x.

Hesse: My son showed me his speed test on his EVO at home, and it was over 8 mbps, so it depends.

4:11 pm: Questions from the audience. The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley asks about the potential deal between Clearwire and T-Mobile, which may be falling apart because of Clearwire’s recent $1 billion in debt that it has raised.

Hesse deflects the question despite several reports to the contrary, by saying he didn’t know anything about that.

Another audience question: What’s your stance on network neutrality?

Hesse: The FCC has come out with a proposal, and we are very supportive of it.

I’m Tricia Duryee, one of the latest additions to All Things Digital. You may know me from the three years I spent at mocoNews, where I wrote about the mobile industry, or before that, as a technology reporter at the Seattle Times. Going forward, I will write about e-commerce and gaming, as well as all sorts of financial machinations.

As you might expect, I will be reporting on some of the more traditional companies in the space, such as Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.

But there will also be strong emphasis on a handful of start-ups that are currently doing their best to upset the status quo. In this bucket, I see three categories emerging: Virtual goods, social-and-group-buying companies and mobile payments.

The dollars are really starting to ring up in these areas, even after such a short period of time. In just three years, Zynga has signed up 320 million registered users, has hired 1,300 employees and is estimated to have $500 million in 2010 revenues with a roughly $5 billion private-market valuation.

Likewise, the two-year-old Groupon is being sought by Google, which BoomTown’s Kara Swisher reports may offer up to $6 billion to get a foothold in the social-buying business and gain a local sales force across the country.

And finally, mobile will be an increasingly hot topic as consumers use their devices for every part of this value chain–from discovering deals to researching recommendations to substituting their wallet for a phone. Among other topics, there’s a flurry of contenders challenging Visa and MasterCard for its merchant fees, which were estimated to have totaled $7 billion in the U.S. over the past year.

Generally, when I think of this coverage area, I see one central theme: How will people make money, and how will consumers pay? Will games be purchased, or will they be ad-supported? Or, will consumers buy one virtual tractor at a time?

The debate reminds me of what Zynga’s CEO and founder, Mark Pincus, said at a recent event, where Kleiner Perkins announced a new fund dedicated to social.

Said Pincus:

“We are massively under-invested across the board in the ‘user-pay economy.’ There’s been this wrong assumption for first-generation Web services that it has to be free with ads. We believe in a model that is supported by users. That’s not just games and virtual goods. There’s a lot of newly created valuable digital goods and services products.”

What will these new services and products be? Will these new models be sustainable? How will they evolve over time? As I look at how it all adds up, I’ll be relying on a lot of you to tell me the important stories that illustrate how we’ve gotten here and where we are going.

And I’ll be wasting no time, as I immediately jump into one of the busiest times of the years–the holiday shopping season!

Online, of course.

[Photo Credit: donebythehandsofabrokenartist]

And the hit reporters/bloggers keep on coming at All Things Digital.

Today, we are honored to add Tricia Duryee to the staff of our site, where she will be covering commerce, online payments, gaming and more.

In other words: She’ll show us the money.

Or not, in some cases.

The broad commerce beat is important to ATD, as we focus on what we think is another key space on the Web–a topic that straddles retail, mobile, social and virtual, as companies old and new try to come up with sustainable business models online.

While Amazon and eBay, as well as new upstarts such as Groupon and Square, are the obvious candidates for Tricia’s coverage, how commerce is innovating on the Internet is a wider-ranging story we aim to cover closely.

And Tricia is just the kind of superb beat reporter we were looking for to pioneer the coverage for us.

She comes to ATD from her recent job as Editor of mocoNews.net, an online site dedicated to covering the wireless industry. MocoNews is a sister publication of paidContent.org, and both are owned by the Guardian News & Media.

Tricia joined mocoNews in February 2008 and has written about how the Apple iPhone has changed the cell phone industry, how ringtones are giving way to mobile TV and how the carriers are building out the next-generation of networks.

Prior to mocoNews, Tricia spent eight years at the Seattle Times. In her first five years, she covered venture capital and Seattle’s start-up scene.

And, in her final three years, she wrote about the regional wireless industry, which included stories such as Cingular’s $41 billion acquisition of AT&T and how T-Mobile’s Sidekick was a must-have among celebrities, including NBA All-Stars such as Ray Allen.

The Seattle native attended the University of Oregon, where she received a degree in journalism and a minor in business.

Tricia is located in Seattle still, in a 102-year-old house, with a 10-year-old dog and a more recent husband.

We’re also thrilled Tricia is reporting from there and hope she’ll give our readers a flavor of what’s going on in tech in the Pacific Northwest, which is one of the key digital hubs in the U.S.

And the hit reporters/bloggers keep on coming at All Things Digital.

Today, we are honored to add Tricia Duryee to the staff of our site, where she will be covering commerce, online payments, gaming and more.

In other words: She’ll show us the money.

Or not, in some cases.

The broad commerce beat is important to ATD, as we focus on what we think is another key space on the Web–a topic that straddles retail, mobile, social and virtual, as companies old and new try to come up with sustainable business models online.

While Amazon and eBay, as well as new upstarts such as Groupon and Square, are the obvious candidates for Tricia’s coverage, how commerce is innovating on the Internet is a wider-ranging story we aim to cover closely.

And Tricia is just the kind of superb beat reporter we were looking for to pioneer the coverage for us.

She comes to ATD from her recent job as Editor of mocoNews.net, an online site dedicated to covering the wireless industry. MocoNews is a sister publication of paidContent.org, and both are owned by the Guardian News & Media.

Tricia joined mocoNews in February 2008 and has written about how the Apple iPhone has changed the cell phone industry, how ringtones are giving way to mobile TV and how the carriers are building out the next-generation of networks.

Prior to mocoNews, Tricia spent eight years at the Seattle Times. In her first five years, she covered venture capital and Seattle’s start-up scene.

And, in her final three years, she wrote about the regional wireless industry, which included stories such as Cingular’s $41 billion acquisition of AT&T and how T-Mobile’s Sidekick was a must-have among celebrities, including NBA All-Stars such as Ray Allen.

The Seattle native attended the University of Oregon, where she received a degree in journalism and a minor in business.

Tricia is located in Seattle still, in a 102-year-old house, with a 10-year-old dog and a more recent husband.

We’re also thrilled Tricia is reporting from there and hope she’ll give our readers a flavor of what’s going on in tech in the Pacific Northwest, which is one of the key digital hubs in the U.S.

I got that one wrong. Hearst is getting ready to launch a Web version of the paper while shutting down the print version as early as next week, the PI reports.

But Hearst seems to agree with my dubious assessment of a Web-only paper’s chances. Which is why it’s preparing to go ahead with just a handful of the paper’s existing staffers.

The PI says perhaps 20 will stay on at the digital version. It’s possible that number may get bigger once you factor in folks from the business side. But it’s still going to be a tiny crew: The PI currently employs some 180 people.

And I think that number might still be too big: Last time I checked, the PI was attracting some 2.6 million unique visitors a month. That’s basically the size of a decent-sized professional blog, which would perhaps have a dozen employees at most–and would also be selling ads to a national audience.

Meanwhile no one has figured out how to generate advertising at any scale from local advertisers. And Seattle’s online dollars that are available have plenty of suitors. Among them the still-extant Seattle Times daily and The Stranger, the city’s well-established alternative weekly.

Again, it looks as if Hearst has diminished expectations here, too. Check out the pay package it offered a prospective hire, via the PI:

“He said the offer increased his health insurance cost, cut his salary by an unspecified amount, offered to match his 401(k) contributions, required him to forgo his P-I severance pay, reduced his vacation accrual to zero and required him to give up overtime.”

But hey, better a lousy job than no job at all, right? Not according the PI reporter cited above. He says he turned down Hearst’s offer.