Palm

This week former CEO of Palm Jon Rubinstein spoke up on Palm and the software and user interface elements the company created that are now being adopted industry-wide. For those that knew the mobile operating system webOS as created by the former company called Palm, the release of iOS 7 - as well as many other updates to OS' both mobile and desktop - the similarities to certain unique elements cannot be dismissed.

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It's not every day you hear of a smartphone technology getting its own massive 22,000 word, 55-page write up. But that's just what's been announced this week as the article known as "Palm: I'm Ready to Wallow Now" is offered up on the back of the decades-long history of the operating system. Writer Thom Holwerda speaks of the death of the mobile operating system and the long - surprisingly long - life it had before its demise.

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Michael Pryce-Jones, senior governance policy analyst for the CtW Investment Group, stated that he will be campaigning against HP directors G. Kennedy Thompson and John Hammergren at HP’s annual shareholder meeting on March 20th. Pryce-Jones states that both Thompson and Hammergren should be held responsible for “HP’s missteps” including the fall out from its acquisition of the UK software company, Autonomy. Pryce-Jones does not want to campaign against HP’s board chairman, Raymond Lane, because he feels that unseating Lane would result in destabilization in HP’s future.

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Apple's Steve Jobs allegedly threatened Palm with a patent nightmare if the company's execs didn't agree to a no-hire talent poaching policy, new court filings suggest, with Google, Intel, and others all cited as implicit in the pact. Jobs' proposal, detailed by a legal filing quoting former Palm CEO Edward Colligan, was made back in 2007, with the Apple co-founder concerned about employees switching between the big names in tech at the time, and heavily suggesting that Palm should opt in to a no-hire treaty, or face a potential firestorm of patent lawsuits.

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HP CEO Meg Whitman has already said that the company plans to release their own smartphone at some point, but details were pretty scarce. We even spotted a possible HP smartphone in some benchmark details that same day. So, it's not too surprising that the company is reported to have said that they plan on getting back into the smartphone and tablet business.

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It’s hard not to still feel the pain over the demise of webOS, although maybe you can take comfort in the fact that HP was working until the very end on new devices. webOS Nation has unearthed a video from design company Transparent House that shows a webOS device without a portrait QWERTY keyboard. Both Palm and HP's webOS devices offered portrait QWERTY keyboards, but it looks like a full touch experience was being working on behind the scenes.

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HP's open-sourcing of webOS continues today, with the release of the underlying Isis web browser along with a governance model and more of the Enyo components developers will need to create their own webOS devices and apps. Enyo has already been downloaded 40,000 times in the three weeks since its release, the team says, and now there's the Isis Project, "a fast, standards-compliant web browser engine," to go along with it.

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Jon Rubinstein, the ex Palm CEO who joined Hewlett Packard after the company acquired Palm back in April 2010, has left the company. No reason for the executive's departure has been given, though according to AllThingsD Rubinstein leaves HP effective today; "Jon has fulfilled his commitment and we wish him well,” HP spokeswoman Mylene Mangalindan said of the news. Rubinstein had been chief of the webOS division within HP, but was subsequently moved to a more generic "product innovation role."

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This year the artists formerly known as Palm had quite a rough few months with HP dumping the hardware side of their own webOS mobile computing platform - their most recent move, having been announced just last month, is live today: open sourced webOS for all. While the actual main product which will be known as Open webOS 1.0 will not be released until September, they've already got the Enyo piece of the pie available today. This is the application framework that was first shown off on the HP TouchPad and is being released today with developer tools that work with it as Enyo 2.0.

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Angry ex-webOS team members have blamed poor code decisions by software-naive execs for the platform's demise, as well as power struggles amid the OS' adoption by HP. Jon Rubinstein - at the time CEO of Palm - opted for WebKit as the underlying engine on which webOS apps would run, something Paul Mercer, former senior director of software at Palm, tells the NYTimes was a huge mistake. "We just weren’t able to execute such an ambitious and breakthrough design" the ex-software chief argued, suggesting that WebKit simply wasn't up to running applications at the same speed as users experienced on, say, the iPhone.

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This week HP announced that their mobile operating system webOS will be contributed to the open source community. While HP assures us that they will be active in the development and support of webOS in the future, they're now offering the operating system up to the "development power" of the open source community where they're sure both applications and web services will be developed en masse for the next generation of mobile devices. HP assures developers that webOS offers a number of benefits backed up by an easy to work with set of standard web technologies - in short, here you go world, have fun!

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HP is still quietly shopping webOS around among with other Palm assets, according to sources, but insisting that potential buyers of the platform agree to license it back for use in future HP printers. Intel has just entered discussions with HP, a source close to the negotiations spilled to VentureBeat, while Qualcomm - despite sidestepping any suggestions of interest in webOS - is also said to be still in the running.

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