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All HP PCs to have webOS in 2012

Categories: webOS
By: , IntoMobile
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 at 10:32 AM
WebOS to be on all HP PCs in 2012

WebOS to be on all HP PCs in 2012When HP introduced the webOS TouchPad and its new lineup of smartphones, the company said it would be bringing webOS to the PC market. Now, the HP CEO is saying that all of its PCs in 2012 will ship with webOS.

A report out of BusinessWeek said that Leo Apotheke said all of the company’s PCs will ship with this mobile platform in addition to Windows. The goal is to galvanize developers to create apps for this platform, which will make the smartphones and tablets more compelling.

The webOS platform has about 6,000 apps at the moment, which is far less than the 350,000 apps found in the iOS App Store and the 250,000 programs in the Android Market. By including webOS on millions of PCs, this should jump start developer interest.

We’re still not sure how this will work but we know this won’t replace Windows. We’ve always fancied the idea of webOS being used as a quick-boot option for PCs – your device automatically wakes into it and it will sync with your mobile devices to let you know any calls, texts or app notifications.

What will likely happen is that HP’s mobile platform will be an application or a virtualized environment on the desktop where your apps on your phone will sync over and provide notifications. I don’t really see the appeal of using the apps on the desktop that much because most of them should be designed for a strong touch interface but HP has made some cool touch-capable PCs before, so you never know.

What do you think, friends? Will this really be the shot in the arm that webOS needs? Are you interested in this as a consumer? For our lovely developers out there, would this move make you take a look at HP’s mobile platform in addition to the iPhone and Android?

[BloomBerg]

About The Author

Marin Perez

Marin Perez has torture tested cell phones and smartphones for industry leaders like CNET and InformationWeek. He remembers when 4G was just a screen on PowerPoint presentations and is fascinated with the amount of innovation out there. Marin has spent a lot of time with BlackBerry and Android but he finally broke down a bought an iPhone to see what all the hype's about. He also has too many tablets.

  • James

    HP develops & tests their apps in Chrome using a WebOS extension so I’d expect a Chrome-based mechanism for running apps on PCs. Most WebOS apps are HTML5 based.

    Were I building it from scratch, I’d have a taskbar widget that is tied to the HTML5 database for notifications. Each app would run in their own window, with any communication handled through the HTML5 database and/or a manager service. The manager service would handle the background Synergy (aka “cloud”) access.

    I’d configure the background service to support a different WebOS Synergy Profile per windows profile. That would allow each user on the PC to have access to their WebOS apps. That service would support whatever DRM schema HP settles on to manage application downloads. I’d guess that would be a key-based policy, allowing a single downloadable to work on any device as long as the device has acquired a Synergy Profile-specific unlock code via the manager. So Synergy Profile username + Synergy app code + DRM algorithm = app specific permission code.

    Like iTunes, I’d limit the number of devices attached to a Synergy profile. 1 Enterprise tablet, 1 Enterprise phone, 1 personal phone, 1 personal tablet, and 5 PCs. I really expect some Enterprise Synergy service, akin to BBM-type device managment, that has limitations on apps, networking, etc. It wouldn’t surprise me if devices registered to an Enterprise Synergy server could be blocked from homebrew or develper mode. Enterprise tablets might eventually support multiple profiles.

  • http://twitter.com/4u2notice 4u2notice

    waste of time

  • Anonymous

    I’m not familiar with the extra HP software puts on their PCs, but in my experience almost any other software added by the manufacturer of the PC is bloatware. I would also assume that the current software package works on Windows, but dual-boot PC users WebOS that have close to toggle between Windows and WebOS.