HP Announces It’ll Stay in the Tablet Business, One Way or Another



“We need to be in the tablet business,” said HP CEO Meg Whitman in a conference call with analysts, just after she announced HP would keep its PC business rather than spinning it off.
Even though the company killed off its TouchPad tablet that ran the WebOS software it acquired along with Palm, Whitman didn’t know yet whether WebOS would be used in a future tablet from HP. She said the company would make a decision about WebOS within the next two months.
According to the The Wall Street Journal [paywall link], HP has said it might continue licensing WebOS to other manufacturers, even if it’s not going to be making tablets that run it.
Meanwhile, Whitman says HP will continue to focus its tablet efforts on hardware running Microsoft’s upcomingWindows 8, a tablet-friendly operating system that’s not going to be available for at least a few months. Adeveloper preview version for Windows 8 is now available for download — Microsoft hasn’t revealed when the final version will ship — but it’s expected “sometime next year,” according to Tom Kilroy, senior vice president and general manager of worldwide sales at Intel who spoke with PC World earlier this month.
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