At long last, Hewlett-Packard is showing the first fruits of its Palm acquisition. The tech giant on Tuesday offered a look at the Palm Pre 2 smartphone and webOS 2.0. HP called it the most significant update to the mobile operating system since it launched in 2009.
The Palm Pre 2 will arrive in France on Friday and be available in coming months in the United States and Canada through Verizon Wireless. But the market has changed a lot since Palm first launched its innovation. The landscape is peppered with the iPhone 4, a new Research In Motion operating system, dozens of new Android-powered devices, and Windows Phone 7.
Still, HP is bullish on its debut. Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president and general manager of the Palm global business unit at HP, said webOS 2.0 advances the innovations Palm introduced 16 months ago with expanded features. The Palm Pre 2 is also made over with a five-megapixel camera, a glass screen, and both a touchscreen and a slide-out keyboard. But it’s not clear how it will impact a crowded market.
Wait and See
Part of the webOS 2.0 appeal may be in differentiated application experiences and openness that lets developers integrate their applications and services. For example, webOS 2.0 offers true multitasking. Users can pause a game, tap an e-mail notification, check a calendar, read a restaurant review, reply to an e-mail, then switch back to the game without closing anything.
New to webOS 2.0 is a service called Stacks, which groups together open apps. Essentially, Stacks keeps related items together to make managing multiple tasks easier. A new feature called Just Type lets users do things such as start an e-mail, create a message, update their status, and search favorite web sites before they have even opened an app.
“It’s hard to say…