After his on-stage appearance at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference, Jon Rubinstein sat down with John Paczkowski and talked further about the future of webOS. In this second interview, Rubinstein confirmed that webOS will support both LTE and HSDPA+ in the future.
I am very excited to [be] getting to LTE and HSDPA+ (two faster cellular networks). We have some really interesting visions on where webOS can go as you get more and more bandwidth.
As expected, Rubinstein did not single out any devices or give a duration for LTE or HSDPA+ support, but it is encouraging to see Palm looking towards future wireless technologies. The mention of HSDPA+ may also suggest Palm is bringing a handset or a tablet to T-Mobile. Currently, T-Mobile is the only carrier in the U.S. that does not have a webOS device in its handset lineup.
Rubinstein also confirmed that Palm is finally utilizing the resources of HP that are available. According to Rubinstein’s count, Palm has hired over 70 new people and has obtained another 200 from other divisions at HP. Some of these folks were possibly moved from the Windows Home Server team, a desktop product lineup that was mothballed earlier this month.
With all these new resources, Palm may be gearing up to do something big with webOS in 2011. The manufacturer is rumored to be working on five or six new devices for the upcoming year. One device, unofficially dubbed the PalmPad, is a tablet that may debut as soon as March 2011. Details on the other four of five handsets are not known, but they are expected to be a significant change from the Palm Pre 2, a handset that was left over from Palm’s days as free-wheeling, independent company.
Hopefully, Palm can transition from the “coming soon” stage of planning to the release stage very soon. webOS is already at less than 1.3% market share and Palm needs to do something soon, if it wants to climb into third or fourth place behind Apple, Android, and Windows Phone.
[Via PreCentral]