HP has explained how it is going to develop the WebOS platform after it acquired smartphone manufacturer Palm.

HP has now announced that it will be integrating the WebOS platform into some of its other product lines, including network printers. This means that smartphones will no longer be the only devices powered by the WebOS platform.

“You’ve now got a whole series of web-connected printers and as they connect to the web you need an OS. We prefer to have that OS, in our case, be our IP where we can control the customer experience,” said HP’s Mark Hurd during a conference this week.

Read the full story on top10

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• HP wants Palm OS for Web-connected printers, Hurd says (infoworld.com)

Verizon Wireless will today be rolling out the latest version of Palm’s webOS, version 1.4.1 to the Palm Pre Plus and the Pixi Plus. The update will be delivered sometime today and it comes with a number of bug fixes and new features.

Source: Geeky gadgets

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• Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus Coming to AT&T (mashable.com)

Lenovo – with Huawei and ZTE reportedly out of the picture – may be the most likely to bid for ailing smartphone-maker Palm, according to a report. Palm, meanwhile, insists it can still be just fine on its own – thank you very much – but would consider licensing out its webOS platform. Palm is also working on new smartphones to complement the Pre and Pixi.

HTC, Nokia, Motorola and Research in Motion have all been named as companies that might benefit from purchasing smartphone-maker Palm, which has struggled for some time to keep a foothold in the market it initially helped create.

However, an April 23 Reuters reported finds that Lenovo appears to be the most likely candidate to place a bid.

Source: eWeek.

Smartphone maker Palm has put itself up for sale, and will begin fielding offers from buyers this week — sources close to the matter tell Bloomberg.
Palm’s stock jumped 32 percent last week with rumors that computer-maker Lenovo and cellphone manufacturer HTC were eying the company for purchase. Now we’ve learned that those rumors are true, and that Lenovo and HTC may make offers soon.

Source: VentureBeat

Shares of Palm Inc. (PALM 5.21, +0.56, +12.04%) rose nearly 12% to $5.19 in pre-market trade on Friday after reports HTC Corp. of Taiwan said in a regulatory filing that it would not comment on a published reports that it was in talks to acquire the smartphone maker. Earlier in the week shares of Palm rallied on speculation it might be acquired by PC maker Lenovo.

Source: Market Watch

CNN Money has an interview with Palm’s CEO; here are some of the highlights:

The conventional wisdom is that Palm has blown it and either is going to run out of money or get sold or both.

Clearly we’ve hit a speed bump. No question about it. It’s really disappointing, and it’s frustrating. But, the company has tremendous assets.  We’ve got a great team we’ve built over the last couple of years.  Remember this whole thing was a transformation story.  It  wasn’t like we took something that was working and didn’t run it well.  We started off with a company that had no future, and we have been transforming it. We have arguably the best mobile operating system out there. It’s clearly the easiest to use and has the most intuitive user interface. We’ve got good products that get critical acclaim.  It’s in its early stages still, but we’ve got great quality of apps, and new apps coming all the time.  By the time you get this published, we’ll have commerce going in Europe, which is a big milestone for us.  We’ve got good relationships with carriers.

We’ve got all those things going for us, and what we need to do is get more commercial success and get to scale.  And that’s going to take longer than we’d hoped, obviously, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get there.  We do have $590 million in the bank, and we have a plan that carries this company forward. Now, we need to be frugal and we need to invest in those areas that have the best return for us, but when I read that we’re going out of business or our stock is worth zero or those kinds of things, it defies logic to me.

One Wall Street analyst says the [Palm] webOS no longer is a major differentiator because there are enough good mobile operating systems. You obviously disagree.

I would disagree.  Look, webOS, has all the capabilities you’d expect from a world-class smart phone. It does email and messaging. It does Web browsing and video capture.  And then it has some things that most don’t have: capabilities to share and edit video, and immersive 3D gaming.  There’s a whole list of things that you’d expect the top tier to have, and we have those all in webOS. Then we have additional things, like real multitasking. So, if you’re playing 3D games and you want to go check your calendar or email, you can just switch between tasks and come back to your game.  And then if you have multitasking, you really need unobtrusive notifications so that when you’re doing something you can get a notification of what’s going on in the world without interrupting what you’re working on.  We also have a feature called Synergy that gives users the ability to have a single view of their data from various sources in the cloud, from Facebook and LinkedIn and Exchange and Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO). We have universal search, so you just start typing, which goes back to Palm’s original DNA of really minimizing the number of steps you have to take to accomplish it. And it goes on and on.

Please forgive the downer questions, but here’s another …

That’s okay, go ahead.  I’m bummed out too, by things like not taking off at Verizon.  One of the analysts on our earnings call asked if we had launched when Droid launched, and Droid launched when [we] launched at Verizon, would the story have been opposite?  I said I think we have a better product than Droid, and customers would have been happier with it.

Was it a mistake to debut with Sprint in the first place?

Hindsight is always 20/20, but you have to understand that we had a long-term relationship with Sprint. Sprint wanted to do an aggressive launch on webOS.  They were willing to invest significant marketing dollars.   But the quid pro quo for that is that we had to do an exclusive with Sprint. Now, if I sit today and I kind of roll back the clock and go, okay, now if I could have launched in October with Verizon, and done a shorter exclusive with Sprint, and the world would be completely different today, yeah, I mean, that’s easy to say. But you don’t know these things at the time. And Sprint has been a really good partner for Palm.  They continue to be a really good partner for Palm.

It’s being reported by Advertising Age that Palm has dropped their ad firm AgAge and is currently seeking a new company to replace them.

AdAge made a bunch of weird and out of touch commercials that never really explained to users why they needed a Palm device or the companies new WebOS offering.

Read the full story on Inquisitr

Verizon Wireless is running a sale on Palm smartphones right now that makes a Palm Pre Plus the ultimate iPad companion. Palm Pre Plus phones are selling for $49 for two (and Palm Pixi Pluses are $29 for two), with a Wi-Fi router option coming free with your smartphone service plan. In our tests of the Pre’s Wi-Fi mode, we got about 1.2 megabits down, the speed of a basic home DSL connection. We’re not sure how long this deal will last; the router option used to cost an extra $40 per month. The plan has a 5GB usage cap, and remember you’ll run the phone’s battery down in a few hours in router mode.

Source: PC Mag

It may have taken a little while for those in Europe to be able to get a Palm Pre, however that does not seem like it will be the case with the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus. The timing of this also follows up nicely on those earlier rumors suggesting that the Pre Plus was going to soon be available with O2.

Read: Palm Pre Plus & Pixi Plus Are Heading To Europe [GCF (Global Certification Forum) Approval Arrives For The Palm Pre Plus & Palm Pixi Plus] » TFTS – Technology, Gadgets & Curiosities

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• Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus coming to O2 this April (ubergizmo.com)

the Palm Pre Plus is now up against the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700 in Laptop Magazine’s March Smart Phone Madness contest. Let’s help give Palm some good news to write about and push them into the Final Four.

Source: ZD Net