The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

The long-awaited v2 upgrade to Palm’s WebOS will be called HP WebOS 2. Sorry Palmfans but this is the next step in the demise of the Palm brand. The new WebOS will initially run on the soon to be released Palm Pre 2, but don’t expect a Palm Pre 3 to follow, it is likely to be an HP Pre 3 or some other moniker under the HP brand. Sad for Palm, but good for WebOS, and hopefully ultimately good for us the consumers.

I hope HP is going to sell their WebOS phones in South Africa. SA Palmfans had to get their Pres from all over the world (mine from Germany with a qwertz keyboard) and still don’t have access to the Palm App Catalog. Here’s hoping HP will remember the SA market. HP has a long history of selling laptops, desktop and printers in the SA market and has an established reseller and support network here. C’mon HP.

This is what HP’s CEO Mark Hurd said yesterday at a technology conference:

We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business. And I tell people that, but it doesn’t seem to resonate well. We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business, and we are not going to spend billions of dollars trying to go into the smartphone business; that doesn’t in any way make any sense. According to Hurd, HP was actually more interested in Palm’s IP – specifically webOS, which he wants to put on “tens of millions of HP small form-factor web-connected devices”

He is either nuts or lying. I hope it is the latter.

Clearly time to wake up. Palm has been bought, or rather is going to be bought, not by HTC or Lenovo, but by HP. For US$1.2b apparently. Brilliant news I think. HP and Palm may well be a good match, with both companies having a strong engineering and innovation heritage. HP used to have a strong contender in the business smartphone market, the iPAQ, which was built around Windows Mobile (the old one), but can’t remember when last I have seen a new iPAQ launched or when last I have seen someone using one. So HP needed to do something if they wanted to get back into the mobile phone market, and Palm may be their ticket. Palm’s excellent WebOS may go far with the financial muscle of HP to back it. Go Palm and HP. Go here for the press release.