HP announced during a conference call that it will shut down manufacturing and sales of webOS hardware in Q4 2011. This includes the recently released TouchPad tablet and Pre and Veer smartphones. What the future for the WebOS platform will be like is highly uncertain and it might just follow Symbian to a slow death.
WebOS was acquired by Palm in 2010 and is very competent operating system for smartphones and well equipped for the more powerful and advanced hardware of the mobile segment. Palm could not match the software with decent hardware, which it hoped that HP could when it acquired Palm for 1.2 billion dollar in April of last year.
Even thoguh HP has launched the first WebOS products this year the sales have been slow and bugs in the operating system have been too prominent, but many still speak well of the overall impression of the operating system where not the least the multitasking support with its “cards” have been highly praised.
HP has not managed to boost the platform and has been forced to pay 100 million dollar in fees for unsold TouchPad tablets left on the shelves at BestBuy. The sales have been going worse then expected, but that has decided to terminate sales of mobile devices already was not expected. It also showed some uncertainty before the PC divition, but more on that later.
HP will focus more on the business software where there is better profitability and with extreme competition from Apple, Google and Microsoft on the mobile market we can certainly understand the move. A first big step was the acquisition of the software company Autonomy Corp. for 10.25 billion dollar that was confirmed during the call.
HP had big plans for WebOS, but none of the above will become real now
The big question is if WebOS will be discountinued or if HP will start licensing the operating system to customers, or perhaps even sell WebOS to one of the major phone makers. We hope for the latter since there are a couple of heavy candidates that might have the muscle to make something of WebOS.
