HP Windows 8 Tablets Confirmed, TouchPad Users May Soon Hear webOS Has A Future [Meg Whitman Decides to Keep HP PC Business, webOS Future Still to be Decided]

Posted on TFTS by Chris Smith on Thursday, 27. October 2011 under: Computers & Computing, Mobile/Cell Phones, PCs, Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets

I’m glad to hear HP decided to keep its PC business intact, since, at the end of the day, HP is a major player in the personal computing industry. The new CEO of the company, Meg Whitman, decided not to go through with the plans of her predecessor, and we may see plenty of new HP computers hit stores in the near future.

What’s more interesting though is that Whitman confirmed the company will be launch Windows 8 tablets. Earlier this week we heard that HP may already be testing Windows 8 on the TouchPad, and I personally wouldn’t be surprised to see the device repurposed and upgraded for Windows 8 usage.

The TouchPad was supposed to be HP’s iPad 2 rival, but the company ended up selling the webOS tablet for nickels and dimes in order to ditch the existing TouchPad stock and retreat as fast as possible from the mobile business.

Of course that was back when visionless Leo Apotheker was in charge of the company. But tablets aren’t going anywhere. In fact, we may soon see a flurry of new devices hit stores and they’re poised to get smarter and smarter. Why not try to make some cash of such devices especially when you control both the hardware and the software, just like Apple does?

HP paid a lot of cash to acquire Palm, but it wasn’t really able to turn webOS into a must have product. Now that Whitman is leading the company we may see the webOS department properly organized and ready for action in the mobile space. Of course, that is if she decides to keep webOS as well. The company sees webOS as the “next piece to complete” and a decision regarding its future with HP will be made public in the following months.

Until that happens current webOS tablet owners can hope their TouchPad will still have a future when it comes to software updates. If it’s not going to be webOS then surely someone will figure out a way to install Windows 8 on the device.

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