HP WebOS Tablet: Hurricane Rumors Pure Conjecture?

Say goodbye to the HP Slate tablet featuring Windows, and prepare instead for an HP Hurricane, a Q3 2010 tablet release featuring Palms’ webOS operating system. That’s the ongoing rumor. But is the rumor true?

The speculation sounded too good to be true, so this blogger did a little web-investigative-journalism. Apparently, all main rumors sites (and even big names like Engadget) are pointing to a lone Examiner.com article that features LA Gadgets Examiner Daryl Deino. His claim:

An insider at HP tells us that a webOS tablet under the code name HP Hurricane could be released the third quarter of this year.

And that pretty much it. The rest of the article is speculation with brief commentary.

Now here’s something you might not have known. I was once an Examiner writer. Most Examiner writers are singular individuals (so who is Deino’s aforementioned “us”?) and have to be self-motivated to write, since Examiner pays you by the hits. Now I’m not saying that Deino made something up to make a few bucks, but here are a few reasons why I don’t think you’ll be seeing a Q3 2010 tablet from HP…

1. Even though Palm had built webOS to scale out, recompiling it to run on an Intel Atom CPU from an ARM CPU is not something that would be done this quickly unless Palm already had it in the works.
2. The  HP ‘Slate’ still seems a much ‘sexier’ name than ‘hurricane.’ While HP may have changed the device’s name to avoid bad press, it just doesn’t seem likely.
3. If an HP Tablet made it out the door by Q3, this blogger feels it would be a rushed product. At best, HP would be smart, position the new ‘hurricane’ for a holiday 2010 release and hype it up.
4. WebOS, even if it’s running at this very second on HP’s tablet hardware, does not have enough applications to make it a viable $499 purchase. The apps currently available on webOS make it a decent smart phone, but not a solid tablet computer, especially stacked up against the iPad. HP needs to be doing something bigger if they want to even pretend they’re competing with Apple or Google’s Android. (As of January 2010, webOS had  1,000 apps compared to Android’s 50,000 and Apple’s ever expanding universe of nearly 200,000.)

This blogger thinks that — while the webOS tablet is more than likely — don’t bet on it happening until the end of 2010 earliest.

And as a general rule, always  — always — check your sources on rumors. It’s easy to squelch out the less-than-reputable ones.

Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center; and via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; Twitter and VARtweet.