To diversify further away, earlier this year HP acquired Palm, the proprietary PDA-smartphone maker, to launch its own-branded smartphones, effectively competing directly against Nokia, Apple, Motorola, Samsung and Dell.
In January 2012, Jon Rubinstein, former top engineer at Apple and then CEO at Palm, left Hewlett-Packard (HP) after serving his 24 months.
To help share development costs of webOS and expand the market for its developers, HP has warmed to the idea of licensing the Palm-developed operating system.
Hewlett-Packard is said to have killed the Slate, which was to be based on Microsoft's Windows, and is now reportedly working on a tablet using an operating system from Palm, the smart-phone maker that HP recently bought.
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Printing from the Palm was an option only with an expensive Bluetooth-enabled HP printer I didn't happen to have.
Lawyers for the 71-year-old singer - real name Ernest Evans - filed a "cease and desist" order against HP and its subsidiary Palm in September 2012, soon after the app became available.
From that point on it was all HP -- the two companies negotiated from April 24 to April 28, when the merger was approved by Palm's outside accountants at Goldman Sachs and announced to the world.
There were none in the call, but here is the vision last Thursday, before Hurd left: HP is about to roll out a number of Web-connected devices, using the operating system acquired with Palm earlier this year.
The phone felt slightly fuller in the hand compared to the recent glut of sub-10mm devices, measuring in at just under 12mm thick, but like Palm's HP's now defunct Pre range, it's a very comfortable fit in the hand.
Despite those growth prospects as well as the migration toward higher priced smartphones from mobile phones, in August 2011 HP announced plans to kill the TouchPad and WebOS smartphone business it acquired when it bought Palm in April-2010.
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