At the Wall Street Journal’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference, Jon Rubinstein took the stage to talk about the past and future of Palm’s webOS. When asked about Palm’s focus prior to being acquired by HP, Rubinstein says that a tablet really wasn’t in the works and that the company’s main focus was on phones. Of course, that all changed soon after HP picked up Palm as the manufacturer has promised a number of new hardware options next year – including tablet computers.
But Rubinstein was also asked about what webOS might be capable of and whether we would find the operating system on more than just smartphones and tablets. The next natural guess would be netbooks, and this is what he had to say:
I think a netbook is fine. I don’t really want to get into the notebook business. We’ll leave that to Microsoft. The notebook business is partnering closely with Microsoft. We’re not focused on that at all. Our plan isn’t to subsume what Microsoft [does]. That’s not our goal. There is a very, very strong business on both the notebook and desktop space–and server space–that’s Windows-based and that makes sense.
Of course it makes sense not to jump into the notebook space since there are some serious, well-established players in that game – including HP. After all, webOS still has a very small market share and the number of available hardware for it is slim. Palm would do well to keep the focus on growing its smartphone and tablet portfolio before diving into anything else.
An interesting bit of information gleaned from the interview is the possibility of offering a cloud service for webOS. Obviously one can sync and restore info from the cloud creating an account when first powering on a webOS device for the first time – in fact, it’s mandatory – but this is something different. When asked whether there would be a dedicated cloud service to access data and information on our PCs, all Rubinstein could say was, “Stay tuned.”
For the full interview, head over to link below.
[Via: All Things D]