HP realizes they suck at making phones. To stick with tablets and printers.

Looks like HP is lining up the canceled/delayed Slate with their recent Palm acquisition.  Mark Hurd, CEO of HP was quoted with saying “We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business.”  This is probably a good thing as much as the last Ipaq I used sucked.  This along with issues of infrastructure and the smartphone market saturation are a hefty barrier.  What HP and company are after is Palm’s long list of patents involving WebOS for use in pretty much everything but smartphones.  From HP’s host of cameras, printers and other small connected devices this could be a unifying UI/UX for their consumers, creating an interesting space of unified consumer goods with lots of interconnectivity and interaction.  All of this is already built into the foundations of the OS as a smartphone system.  Most are seeing this manifest itself in the form of a WebOS tablet coming to market as well as the reason for the delay of the previous tablet.  HP has done quite a bit of R&D on their Slate and holding off another year to incorporate the awesomness of WebOS onto it would not be a significant setback.  Having WebOS instead of a full fledged Windows 7 tablet would be a much more competitive device in the “instant on” category of devices where customers need to be able to access information nearly instantaneously.  Anyone waiting for Windows 7 to boot up on a netbook (not me, SSD FTW!)  can tell you that information is not always quickly accessible despite all the additional capabilities that come with a full PC operating system.  This could be that delicate middle ground of form and function we’re all craving.  As long as it’s smaller than this Courier wanna-be.  See the original Boy Genius Report HERE.