Bargain hunters who were able to get the tablet deal of the year, a cheap full-featured TouchPad for $99 are now closer to getting a touch of Android running as an app in webOS and a new prize-winning text-to-speech app.
There is an Android app that runs from an IPK and lets Android run within a card. It is believed to be running as virtual machine or Android SDK emulator. It doesn't run YouTube videos or audio and lacks multi-touch, but gives webOs a touch of Android.
Amazon is learning from the HP TouchPad fire sale by pricing its Amazon Kindle Fire at a super low price and also may even buy the operating system from HP. The sale is a family affair. The Amazon Kindle Fire is on presale from Amazon and will be released on November 15. The HP TouchPad was liquidated in August.
VentureBeat reported that Amazon is closest to make a deal to buy Palm and webOS software. Palm's former CEO Jon Rubinstein is on the Amazon board. Rubenstein told Joshua Toplosky, in July that Amazon would make a "great partner' to expand webOS devices. The operating system was created by Palm for the launch of the Palm Pre and can also run on smartphones.
HP has been the subject of many rumors - sales of webOS TouchPads, layoffs and sale of the PC division.
Termination of former Palm webOS staff started this week. HP confirmed the job cuts but did not go into specific numbers. Some are saying that as many as 525 jobs were cut. On the brighter side, employees who are still working on 9/28 will be able to buy discounted new stock of HP TouchPads.
An email from an HP spokesman said:
If you like little credit-card sized powerful smartphones, then you may be veering to the HP Veer, a webOS smartphone that is expected to launch soon on the AT&T network.Some think that there will be a release date announcement at...
HP announced the HP TouchPad with 9.7-inch diagonal capacitive multitouch display, virtual keyboard, instant-on access, and support for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta. The HP TouchPad runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-CPU APQ8060 1.2GHz processor.HP TouchPad features include either 16GB or...