HP Slate isn’t rumored to be switching from Windows 7 to webOS

May 24th 2010
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At this point, we don’t even know if HP’s Slate is still hitting the market — but one thing we do know is that there’s no evidence to suggest that the company will be releasing it with webOS instead of Windows 7. In fact, the two platforms are so wildly different and targeted for such disjoint devices — never mind the fact that HP and Palm aren’t yet united in the legal sense of the word — that there’s virtually no chance that the existing Slate hardware could be effectively used in time for a near-term webOS tablet launch (at least, not a tablet that anyone would want to buy). There’s word on Gizmodo today that the Slate will be offered as a webOS device, but that appears to be a misinterpretation of a DigiTimes report from HP Taiwan that the company intends to use Palm’s operating system to underpin both “smartphones and tablets,” while avoiding porting it to netbooks since they’re “more similar in functions with traditional computers.” Given the Slate’s lukewarm reception, we can totally understand HP canning it in its current incarnation — but you can’t just drop a flashy mobile platform onto it and call it good. Interestingly, the DigiTimes report goes on to say (on an unrelated note) that the Slate will come to market before October, but it’s unclear whether they’re taking into account the most recent round of rumors that it’s been deep-sixed; guess we’ll know soon enough.