The Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas might be the center of (most) of the technology universe, but technology giant HP is eschewing the chaos and glitz, sending out invitations to its own webOS event scheduled for February 9. HP doesn’t say what it plans to reveal—although all expectations are for the company to roll out the first significant fruit of its acquisition of Palm, hopefully including promised webOS-based tablet devices.
The invitations put to rest the notion that HP was preparing a surprise unveiling for new Palm-based technology at CES, which were widely dismissed by industry watchers since there would be no way for HP to marshall the resources for a big announcement at CES and keep the activity under wraps. The February announcement date may indicate that HP needs a few more weeks to get its webOS reveals put together…or the company may simply be taking a page from Apple’s playbook: the Cupertino company has historically skipped CES (and more recently backed out of Macworld) in favor of hosting its own one-off events and announcements.
HP is widely expected to introduce not only webOS-based tablet devices aimed at the consumer market (now that the Windows 7-running Slate is on offer for enterprise customers), but potentially new webOS-based smartphones as well as printers with webOS technology.
