Edible Apple

It’s now been slightly less than 6 months since HP acquired Palm for $1.2 billion, and though now ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd explained that the acquisition was more about purchasing Palm’s IP than it was to get into the smartphone business, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Reuters reports that Hewlett-Packard is planning to introduce a new line of smartphones running Palm’s webOS software in early 2011.

Speaking at an industry conference, HP Senior VP Eric Cador said, “You will see us coming early next ear with new phones.”

Okay, then.

It’ll be interesting to see what HP has in store given that the market is currently dominated by Apple and a slew of Android devices. RIM, of course, is still in the game, and with Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 set for launch shortly, HP will be entering a much more competitive marketplace than the one Palm entered when it released the Palm Pre, amidst much fanfare, in June 2009. While early reviews of the device were overwhelmingly positive, sales did not live up to expectations. From our vantage point, it seemed that folks were so excited to finally have an “iPhone competitor” on the market that they blindly assumed it would be a hit.

You might also be interested in:

Apple was seriously looking to purchase Palm before it was acquired by HP

Let’s hope this video of an HP Slate running Windows 7 is a fake!