Back in 2009 HP made a huge industry play by acquiring the slowly declining Palm business and accompanying operating system webOS. At the time it seemed like a wise decision that was assumed to be fueled by a bit of patent libraries and an already established set of technologies that would help HP forge its way into the mobile world. Seemed like a good idea at the time. HP is known for their high quality computers and software integration with an operating system like webOS it all seemed like it fell in line for a huge mobile play. In case you were wondering where this is going, the play was not huge and lasted for about a year. What happen? What went wrong? Who really cares. HP spent 1.2 billion dollars on this venture and is now killing off one of the best mobile operating systems that many in the world choose as their go to OS, seemingly because they couldn’t figure out how to sell it.

On Thursday HP announced that they will discontinue webOS mobile devices. This includes the recently launched TouchPad and Veer. Devices like the Pre 3 will supposedly never see the light of day along with the Mansion and that beautiful line up of webOS phones that were shown off shortly after the acquisition. Within the recently published press release you can read that HP was up in the revenue department at 31.2 billion which was a slight increase over last year’s 30.7 billion, I’m sure somewhere in the details those numbers are not as good as they look or need to be. However, this is only mentioned after reading “HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones.” The information goes on to say that HP will continue to “explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.” What will HP do with webOS if it’s not put in mobile phones? Well they had high hopes for this OS being installed on touch screen printers and desktops so maybe there is hope still for webOS. It’s just so sad to see it go. As a dedicated Android user looking for that viable option I was excited to see webOS grow under HP’s direction.

Guess that saying is true, you never know what you got until its gone…Tell us what you think of HP’s 1.2 billion dollar bargain they are throwing out the window. Did you see this coming or were you hoping for a true revival of webOS in the very capable hands of HP? I know I’m with the latter. And of course my friends if you’re using one of these devices you can find many HP accessories as well as Palm accessories right here at WirelessGround