HP announces rebirth of Palm mobile devices

Oct 19, 2010, 23:35 GMT

San Francisco - HP announced the first new Palm products Tuesday since it bought the ailing smartphone pioneer in April for 1.2 billion dollars.

The world's largest computer maker is hoping that Palm's operating system will give it its own line of smartphones and mobile computing devices to compete in that rapidly expanding market with the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft and RIM.

The innovations announced by HP include a new operating system, webOS 2.0, and a new phone, the Palm Pre 2, which is available immediately from SFR in France and will be rolled out in the United States and elsewhere in the coming months, the company said.

HP described webOS2 as the most significant upgrade to the operating system since its June 2009 launch. It includes true multitasking, a new concept called Stacks that groups open applications together, access to the latest version of Adobe Flash and a feature called Exhibition that displays user-defined content while the phone is in its charging dock.

Palm Pre 2 is the first Palm phone with a 1-gigahertz processor and features a 5-megapixel camera, a glass screen and a sleeker, streamlined design that combines a vivid touchscreen and a slide-out keyboard.