HP (Hewlett-Packard) was founded in 1939 and started off as a small, electronics company. The company grew and is now a huge computer hardware/software company. Their products include computers, printers, scanners, cameras, servers, mobile phones and much more. In 2010 HP bought smartphone software and hardware company, Palm, for 1.2 billion dollars. Read on for the latest HP related news, reviews and videos:
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by Michael Fisher | May 23, 2012 5:08 PMWe've recently run a series of articles discussing the awesome features of certain mobile platforms, and how those highlights drive users to love them. We've covered Windows Phone, iOS, and Android, the platforms with the best combination of mindshare and potential, and today I thought I'd give a shoutout to a lesser-known (but immensely influential) player in the mobile space: webOS. If the details are hazy with the passage of time, here's a brief refresher. webOS was Palm's replacement for its legacy PalmOS, the platform that helped launch the smartphone and PDA revolution via the Palm Pi...
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by Michael Fisher | May 22, 2012 3:42 PMThose of you who've followed my writing for a while know that I'm a refugee from the Great webOS Collapse of 2011, and there's still a lot I miss and love about the platform. While I try to write about it as often as I can, the sad truth is there's not a lot of news about the "little OS that couldn't" these days - things are pretty quiet as it marches toward open source. So I'm kind of waiting along with everyone else for that to wrap up this fall. Until then, though, I'm still using webOS somewhat often via my HP TouchPad. Sometimes I even pull the tiny HP Veer out of storage and relive th...
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by Stephen Schenck | May 18, 2012 3:22 PMFollowing last summer's announcement by HP that it was calling it quits on webOS, the company started selling remaining TouchPad stock at some fantastic discounts. That created a huge, new wave of interest in the tablet, and it quickly sold out. Over the following months, we saw HP make some additional units available from time to time, but after one final push on eBay, it looked like supplies had finally dried up. If you'd been wishing you snagged one of those TouchPads while you had the chance, you're in luck, as online retailer Woot has some for sale for today only; would you still be getti...
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by Stephen Schenck | May 11, 2012 7:13 PMThe Pre 3 arrived right around the time of HP's announcement that it was pulling the plug on webOS, but the platform's real swan song came in the form of its TouchPad tablet (above), which saw brisk sales as the company liquidated its stock at bargain-basement prices. Since then, many of those TouchPads have seen new life in the hands of tinkerers, especially through efforts to bring Android to the hardware. Now it looks like HP is planning to return to the tablet game, this time with a very different choice of OS. The Chicago Tribune reports that HP is going to be producing a number of tab...
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by Michael Fisher | May 10, 2012 9:02 AMDevotees of the webOS ecosystem learned long ago not to underestimate the power of a motivated homebrew community. It was grassroots efforts like webOS-Internals that unlocked the potential of the platform and earned the respect and endorsement of Palm, and later HP. It should come as no surprise, then, that a group of similarly talented but differently motivated developers have come together for the common goal of altering yet another webOS device: the diminutive HP Veer. This time, though, their goal isn't to modify webOS, but to replace it- with Android. Fortunately, some of these sha...
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by Michael Fisher | March 23, 2012 12:53 PMI'd like 2012 to know something: I'm fine without Back to the Future's hover-skateboard, or the Jetsons' flying car. I can even survive with the knowledge that the "Human Bird Wings" video is a fake. As I may have mentioned before, I grew up watching Star Trek. The moment I was able to start carrying a communicator and a tricorder wherever I went, "the future" became "the present," and my life was basically complete. Aim high, kids. What I can not brook, however, is the tech world's continued insistence that wires play a part in our wireless world. As personal media players, smartphones,...
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by Michael Fisher | March 17, 2012 12:25 AMLast week, I showed you how to install the CyanogenMod9-Alpha 0.6 build of Android Ice Cream Sandwich on the HP TouchPad. Seven days worth of using Google's software on the ill-fated tablet have left me with a few observations to share. As a recovering webOS die-hard who's carried the TouchPad since launch day, the experience was equal parts surreal and exciting, with one or two dollops of frustration and fear thrown in. If you're a fellow webOS expat, or if you'd just like to see what the CM9 experience is like for someone more used to flipping cards than tinkering with widgets, check out...
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by Michael Fisher | March 11, 2012 3:51 AMWhen HP dumped the TouchPad in spectacular fashion with a bargain-basement firesale last fall, hobbyists flocked to eBay, Amazon, and Best Buy to snag their piece of heavily-discounted tablet hardware. Some of these buyers were just looking for a cheap tablet; others were webOS fans hoping to stock up on some long-term backups for their favorite platform; and still others had a different dream. They wanted a cheap but well-specced tablet on which to run Android. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of the CyanogenMod Team, that dream has finally been willed into reality. And while there are a ho...
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by Anton D. Nagy | February 16, 2012 8:40 AMTaking the stage at the HP Global Partner conference in Las Vegas, Meg Whitman, CEO of HP said she believes that with the Google-Motorola deal now in place Android could become a closed source mobile platform. Meg Whitman reiterated HP's commitment to webOS and reassured everyone that webOS is here to stay for the long run, especially with the platform in need of around four years for its impact to be felt. HP's CEO thinks that a future where Android becomes closed-source will see webOS and its licensees benefitting. However, Google is highly unlikely (read "impossible") to change its busin...
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by Anton D. Nagy | February 8, 2012 5:09 AMHP sold TouchPad tablets like hot cakes back in the time when many changes were made to the company, products and the OS; the tablet (alongside other products) was heavily discounted but HP sent out a couple of TouchPads running an experimental build of Android, to the owners' surprise. Of course, HP initially denied and later own admitted to experimenting with the build; as a direct effect, they wouldn't release the source code since the project should have never seen the light of day. Fast forward to today and we see HP releasing the source code complete with everything, except for the Wi...
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by Anton D. Nagy | February 4, 2012 6:18 AMHP decided to make webOS open source back in December 2011 after plans for selling or licensing out the platform didn't work out. However, HP's CEO Meg Whitman still believes in the potential of the ex-Palm mobile platform, with a twist. "We're going to build another operating system that has huge advantages, in my view, over iOS, which is a closed system, Android, which is incredibly fragmented and may ultimately be more closed with
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by Anton D. Nagy | January 28, 2012 8:59 AMJon Rubinstein left Apple to take over Palm and after HP's acquisition of the company he was on board with Hewlett-Packard. He left the company after completing his commitment to stay 12-to 24-months. "Jon has fulfilled his commitment and we wish him well", said HP's Mylene Mangalindan. "I am going to take a well-deserved break after four and a half years of developing webOS", Rubinstein said. He worked hard on the iPod team over at Apple until he joined Roger McNamee in 2006 as the two created Elevation Partners. Jon Rubinstein became CEO of Palm in 2009 replacing Ed Colligan, where he hel...
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by Stephen Schenck | January 25, 2012 4:37 PMLast month, HP revealed the ultimate fate of webOS, which, instead of ending up locked-away tight in the company's IP vault, would see itself released for the first time as an open source project. Ultimately, that will give dedicated webOS fans that opportunity to continue evolving the operating system, as well as create opportunities for interested companies to manufacture new products based on the platform. Making sure that all its in-house webOS resources are ready to be released to the public is a serious undertaking for HP to bear, and it's going to take some time. Today, the company anno...
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by Anton D. Nagy | January 22, 2012 4:23 AMIf you're among those who managed to grab an HP TouchPad in the very last moments of its existence shouldn't worry about software, especially if you turned Android. There's a new CyanogenMod 9 build for the tablet, even if it's still in Alpha 0 stage. Aside from showing a very early release, the 0 after the Alpha describes the lack of hardware-accelerated video and a non-functional camera. Those aside, if you choose to update, you should also know about the current glitches: audio (the microphone does not work), market filters prevent some apps from being installed, Titanium Backup crashes ...
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by Stephen Schenck | January 12, 2012 3:48 PMThe last half-a-year has been a very uncertain time for users of webOS devices. Optimism for the Pre 3 was quickly derailed by HP's announcement of its intent to cease further production of webOS hardware. That started-off a very tense time for users who had invested in the platform, but as the year wrapped-up, we learned of HP's plans to make the platform open source, giving us hope that there may still be life for it, yet. Throughout all of this, HP has tried to stand-by its existing user base and show what support it could through the release of system updates. We heard a little about the w...
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