HP TouchPad launching in June, webOS beta for PCs this year

Emil

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While answering a question at the HP Summit, HP CEO Leo Apotheker revealed that the TouchPad will launch in three months and that a beta of webOS running in a browser on Windows will arrive by the end of this year. PreCentral has the full quote:

The TouchPad will come out in June and from that date onwards there will be wave after wave of technology coming out to support the webOS platform. There will be a beta version for webOS running on a browser on PCs available at the end of the year and you'll see us putting webOS on that technolgoy on PCs, on Windows PCs I should add, starting from that point onwards and we hope to read 100 million devices a year. We'll put the same technology on our printers, we'll put them on PCs, we'll put them on TouchPads, we'll put them on smartphones, so you'll see this become a very massive, very broad platform.

The HP TouchPad is a 9.7-inch slate (1024x768 resolution), powered by a dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060 processor, 16GB or 32GB of built-in storage, HP's Beats audio, a micro-USB 2.0 port, Bluethooth 2.1+EDR, a front-mounted camera, as well as a light sensor, gyroscope, accelerometer, compass, and GPS (3G model only). It measures 242 x 190 x 13.7mm and weighs around 740g. The device is running a WebOS 3.0 with true multitasking, Flash 10.1, a paneled e-mail application, a pop-up notification system like Growl, Skype support, wireless printing, calendar and e-mail integration via HP Synergy, as well as compatibility with Amazon's Kindle ebook store, Google Docs, QuickOffice, and more. Now that we know it's coming in June 2011, all we have to do is wait for pricing details.

As for webOS on PCs, we only learned last week that HP plans to put it on all of its PCs next year. A beta in 2011 therefore isn't too surprising, although its tie-in with Windows was definitely unexpected. We're not too sure how we feel about having it run in a browser, but we're willing to see what HP cooks up before giving our thoughts.

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