HP TouchPad with webOS
LG announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today that it bought Hewlett-Packard’s webOS to power upcoming televisions.
The terms of the deal are not publicly available but allegedly include all webOS patents, employees, and the operating system’s original source code, according to a report by CNET, and LG notably revealed it plans to use the software to power televisions and not mobile devices.
LG Electronics President and Chief Technology Officer Skott Ahn told CNET that he hopes webOS would create “a new path for LG to offer an intuitive user experience and Internet services across a range of consumer electronics devices.”
LG expanded its Google Smart TV lineup last month from two models in 2012 to seven models in 2013. The sets will feature PrimeTime, Voice Search, and YouTube Send to TV capabilities, and they are a part of the new GA6400 and GA7900 series that boast 42-, 47-, 50-, 55-, and 60-inch screen sizes. The GA7900 will only have 47- and 55-inch models.
Spearheaded by ex-Apple executive John Rubinstein, Palm originally developed WebOS in 2009. HP bought Palm a year later for $1.2 billion to use the platform within its TouchPad tablet and other mobile devices.
The PC manufacturer eventually abandoned the platform after a series of unsuccessful product launches, and even lost Rubinstein shortly after the Palm acquisition, but promised to keep webOS alive as an open source project.
The webOS team will work from LG’s new Silicon Valley Lab.
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