The future of webOS is a little less uncertain now that Samsung’s CEO, Choi Gee Sung, grabbed rumors of buying HP’s webOS business by the cuff, laughed in its face and then coldly stabbed the rumor in the heart.
Choi, in response to a report’s question about the recent analyst report, stated, “It’s not right that acquiring an operating system is becoming a fashion,” and that Samsung would “never” pursue such a deal.
After HP announced it was getting out of the webOS hardware game, several analyst released reports indicating that several key players were interested in picking up the fallen OS. These reports put Samsung as the main buyer, but that’s clearly not the case. Besides, while HP killed its webOS hardware division, the company isn’t abandoning software development — yet. In fact if HP spins off its PC business, this newly created company could revive the TouchPad along with other webOS hardware devices.
Samsung is instead focusing on building out its Bada OS, which many of our commenters pointed out in our original post on the subject. The company just rolled out three new Bada handsets this week, including one with NFC capability. CEO Choi essentially reaffirmed that Android and Bada is Samsung’s future, not buying a second-hand OS.
But with Samsung out of the picture, if HP was looking to off-load webOS, there are not many companies left to run with Palm’s fallen banner. HTC is firmly entrenched with Android, RIM is developing its next generation of BlackBerry smartphones around the QNX platform, Motorola will soon be owned by Google, and Nokia has lucrative deal with Microsoft. Who’s left? Maybe Tiger Electronics will buy webOS and remake the Game.com portable. I’d buy it.