HP Hurricane

I read this online today and thought I'd pass it on:

HP killed off development of its Slate tablet recently, supposedly because of the company’s unhappiness with how it ran Windows 7. After HP acquired Palm and promised that webOS would boldly go where webOS had not gone before, everybody assumed that HP meant tablets, and now we’re hearing the first rumblings of a webOS-powered tablet coming through HP’s pipeline.

Little concrete is known at this point, but a rumor confirmed by the usual unnamed “insider” is that a tablet code-named Hurricane will be running the OS that has powered the most recent generation of Palm phones (like the Pre and the Pixi), and will be coming as soon as the third quarter of this year.

In its favor over the iPad, a webOS tablet would already have multitasking built in from day one, and having the biggest PC manufacturer in the world behind it could give it a lot more clout when it comes to spurring the development of apps that would be needed to compete against Apple’s ecosystem. Still, would it be enough to be viable against tablets running Android, which could be coming from any number of manufacturers and has a sizable and growing app selection already? Even with HP’s backing, webOS would be a third option for tablet software, and a third option is usually one too many for most developers. Do you agree, or could the Hurricane compete well against Android-powered tablets and the iPad?

via Endgadget