The CEO of Palm, Jon Rubinstein, has been frank about past mistakes by the company after it failed to increase its marketshare in the smartphone segment and was ultimately bought by HP.
He has however been very enthusiastic about plans for WebOS next year now that the Pre 2 is out. He did mention some products including a tablet and smartphones but did not expand over previous claims by HP that there would be non-traditional devices (like printers) using WebOS 2.0.
HP could potentially swap Windows 7 on the HP Slate 500 tablet for the WebOS; a much lighter footprint means that the device would run faster but also cost cheaper because there would be no Windows licenses.
We believe however, that HP will move away from the Intel platform and focus instead on ARM like most of its competitors (Apple, Blackberry, Cisco).
There are plenty of rival next generation architectures (Nvidia Tegra 2, Ti OMAP4, Samsung Orion) to choose from to ensure that tablets, netbooks or indeed microservers and thin clients, build around WebOS 2.0 are as fast, if not faster, than their Wintel counterpart.
You can view the interview of Jon Rubinstein at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco below.