Six months after Hewlett-Packard announced it was buying smartphone pionners Palm for $1 billion, technology watchers are still waiting to see just what emerges from the high-profile marriage.
Palm chief Jon Rubinstein still isn’t tipping his hand on any details around smartphones and tablets that are due next year from the new HP unit. But he certainly made no effort to manage expectations on Tuesday at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
“It’s absolutely a hits business…We have several products that will clearly be hits when they come out,” said Rubinstein, who predicted “tremendous growth” in devices based on webOS, the Palm platform that HP acquired when it bought the company this year for roughly $1 billion.
“At the same time next year you’ll see us be in a very different position,” he said, saying there is still plenty of room in the fast-growing market for mobile connected devices
Rubinstein is of course famous as the man who developed Apple’s first iPod. But he started his career some 30 years ago, right out of college, at HP. Rubinstein acknowledged that by landing at Palm after leaving Apple, he is definitely off Steve Jobs’ Christmas list.
You might think from listening to most of the world’s iPhone, iPad, i-everthingelse enthusiasts that Steve Jobs and Apple can do no wrong, but not everybody is in agreement.
Not many companies can get away putting out an expensive product with a pretty big technical glitch and still have sales zoom to the stratosphere.
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It’s day three of the Sun Valley media conference and the event has started to feel like a Jane Goodall documentary, in which we’re Jane and the moguls are the apes who have become comfortable letting us observe and record their movements. Several media executives groggily making their way to the morning’s first session (scheduled to kick off at 7:30), stopped to chat with the throng of press waiting to greet them.
