Palm and HP to announce new WebOS tablet and phones…is this Palm’s real comeback??

HP are hosting a big event in San Francisco on Feb 9 and if the
company’s Personal Systems Group Executive VP Todd Bradley is to be
believed, we can certainly expect a WebOS tablet to be announced as
well as a few smart phones in a range of different form factors. We’ve got high hopes for these new devices. Palm‘s WebOS is a
great mobile operating system. In many ways it embodies the ideal that
Android (whose director of user experience is Matias Duarte, the
father of WebOS) is getting closer and closer to – a true, and
coherent multitasking experience. However, because the OS has only
been seen on the smaller-than-most screens of the Palm Pre, and Pixi
lines, we have yet to experience WebOS on a screen large enough to
take full advantage of the clever and smooth OS . It looks like Feb 9
will be the day when that all changes.

On the phone side of things, there has been a lot of rumours about the
form factors that are expected but personally we hope to see at least
one smartphone model with a physical keyboard, and ideally one
slate-style phone with a large 4.3″ screen, akin to something like the
Evo 4G.

If we’re honest, any announcements of new hardware at the special
event will be a welcome, and somewhat overdue, cause for celebration
among Palm fans. While the Pre was, and in some ways still is, a
great phone, its two updates (the Pre Plus and the Pre 2) have failed
to progress the product in any meaningful way and consumers and
reviewers have been bitterly disappointed with the missed
opportunities that these minor iterations represent. That’s why the
prospect of new hardware is so exciting to fans of the company and its
great software. A proper integration of some excellent hardware with
an OS that we already consider to be one of the best out there, could
really shake things up in the smartphone market. We have already seen
a lot of demos of RIM‘s Playbook, a device whose UI evidently owes a lot
to WebOS, so clearly a product with Palm’s intuitive OS scaled up for
a large screen tablet format, together with the distribution
capabilities of HP, really does have the potential to make a real mark
in the suddenly crowded tablet space.

After a tumultuous few years for Palm, ending in the company’s
acquisition by HP, Palm can finally count on the financial might of HP
to allow them to get back to the important task of getting their OS on
some innovative products, and most importantly, they’ll have the
infrastructure to actually ship these products. Bradley has hinted at
a PalmPad being only one of many products in an entire WebOS
‘ecosystem’ so it sounds like some cloud services are to be expected
too. We can’t wait to see what Palm announces on Feb 9 but whatever it
is, we hope it’s hardware that does justice to WebOS but above all, it
desperately needs to provide the long suffering fans of the company
with something to shout about, finally.