HP recently acquired Palm and its WebOS for $1.2 billion. It turns out that HP filed a trademark for PalmPad on July 7th, about a week after the acquisition was completed. HP executives had indicated they were less interested in Palm's smartphones (a real shame), and primarily interested in WebOS. Well, it all now makes sense that HP's vision to produce a tablet of some sort has been resurrected with WebOS, rather than a Windows version on the rumored Slate, that didn't make it to market. The Palm WebOS is ideal for such a device and would give HP credible competition against the Apple iPad. However, by the time a PalmPad makes it to market (earliest is 2011 sometime), Apple is likely to be launching/announcing a second generation iPad in January 2011, which may well sport two cameras to deliver FaceTime functionality, and a whole host of improvements.
The Palm OS was always a good stable business operating system but the company sadly was less than stellar at marketing. We shall have to wait and see whether HP can deliver anything that will diminish the consumer's love affair with iPads and iPhones. Unless HP significantly undercuts the price of an iPad, I can't see it taking any significant sales from Apple, not even in the corporate sector where iPad sales are already making inroads.
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