Now that it owns the touchscreen WebOS, HP has all kinds of plans for Palm’s impressive mobile platform, including new WebOS-based smartphones, tablet PCs — and, oddly enough, printers. Sounds crazy, but it just might work.
HP chief executive Mark Hurd brought up the somewhat random idea during the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday, during which the CEO noted that HP (among other manufacturers) has “a whole series of Web-connected printers that, as they connect to the Web, need an OS,” Ars Technica reports.
And given that HP just gobbled up Palm — the company behind WebOS, the platform that powers the Palm Pre and Pixi — well, looks like HP suddenly has its own OS at its disposal, which would allow the tech giantto “control the customer experience as we always have in the printing business, and that’s a big deal to us” (as Hurd puts it in the Ars post).
OK, so what would one … ah, do with a WebOS-based printer, exactly? As someone who owns the most basic inkjet printer imaginable, I wouldn’t know where to begin. But as Matthew Miller at ZDNet points out, the latest HP Photosmart printers (among other makes and models, I’m sure) perform some pretty impressive, Net-connected tasks all on their own, from printing out directions from Google Maps to pumping out movie tickets.
“Imagine,” Miller writes, “using pinch to zoom in a photo editor, print out Google Maps directions, check your contacts or schedule with Palm’s Synergy and print out data you want to physically share with someone, check out a New York Times article and print it … with a solid mobile OS [and] a growing list of applications.”
All right, yes … that does sound kinda cool, even to someone who only uses his printer to zap out the oddmailing label or expense report.
That said, I’m hoping HP has its priorities straight when it comes to building new WebOS-based products — i.e., let’s work on a WebOS tablet first, shall we?
