HP on Palm acquisition: we won't be doing smartphones, but we will keep webOS alive

Despite the fact that it bought the struggling Palm back in April, Hewlett Packard has no plans to go into the smartphone market, it seems.

The $1.2 billion acquisition led many to believe that HP had its sights set on smartphones, but speaking at a technology conference this week the company's CEO Mark Hurd dispelled that idea. Stating outright that HP did not buy Palm to be in the smartphone business, he went on to add that spending billions of dollars to get into a competitive position in the market  "doesn't in any way make sense".  Instead, the purchase was all about the intellectual property, Hurd said.

While he made no promises at all about HPs intentions for its new acquisition, it has been noted that Hurd's lack of specific comment on Palm's WebOS mobile operating system ran the risk of sending the wrong message to the developer community associated with the platform. Make it sound as though you're not going to do much with the OS and all the developers go elsewhere; then if you do ever want to put it into action in future there are no third-party apps to run on it.

Questioned on the WebOS situation, however, HP explained that it does intend to use the Linux-based OS: "We believe webOS can become the backbone for many of HP's small form factor devices, and we expect to expand webOS's footprint beyond just the smartphone market, all while leveraging our financial strength, scale, and global reach to grow in smartphones."