HP's webOS 2.0 to take on iPhone 4, iPad later this year

HP’s recent acquisition of Palm and all of its intellectual property has resulted in many people wondering just what are they going to do with the company as well as its jewels, where the webOS is chief among them. Well, word has finally come out that HP will be positioning its Palm webOS 2.0 as a direct competitor to both the iPhone, iPad and Android devices, which would mean relegating its Windows 7 Slate PC offerings to a business tablet niche. According to HP, they are working to modify its consumer offerings to help it be similar to Apple in some ways, where they intend to market premium hardware which will not come up short in terms of software, which is where the webOS software platform comes in.

You might wonder though, will this move somehow affect HP’s rather close relationship with Microsoft, considering HP is the world’s largest Windows PC vendor? It would be interesting to see how the future unfolds though – after all, earlier this year, HP demonstrated its Slate PC that is powered by Windows 7, a move which was seen by many to be a preemptive strike on Apple’s planned tablet device although the HP Slate didn’t manage to make it out of the stable doors even after the Apple iPad was shipped, selling millions in the process. This was followed by picking Palm up for slightly over a billion dollars, which might point towards new HP smartphones being powered solely by the webOS platform only, and will not rely on Windows Phone 7.

HP has now officially announced that it will do exactly that, just like how Dell will not use Windows Phone 7 but rely on Android as the OS of choice instead (without ruling out the possibility of building its own mobile platform from scratch). HP will still build a Windows 7 “Slate 500″, but it will only target enterprise customers so regular Joes like you and I probably won’t see much of it in the streets.