Rubinstein: HP Android Tablet and smartphone are 86'd

Former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein still makes headlines in his current capacity as head of Hewlett Packard's mobility group. And what the executive said today was that HP has decided to stop working on an Android tablet and an Android smartphone and will focus on webOS. Talking with the Financial Times, Rubinstein said that after acquiring Palm and its' webOS platform for $1.2 billion, three operating systems were one too many and it was Google's open source OS that got the pink slip.

HP is expected to roll out a webOS flavored tablet early next year, as we reported. Work on the Slate, a Windows Phone 7 powered tablet, was said to have been stopped but Rubinstein told the paper that a Windows based pad will be launched before the webOS tablet is released. Microsoft said that HP's decision to concentrate on producing smartphones using webOS was not a big deal for the company as HP was not a big player in the smartphone industry.

Rubinstein was the CEO of Palm when the company launched the Palm Pre, the first phone with webOS under the hood. When introduced in January 2009, the OS received critical praise and the Pre was instantly considered a worthy challenger to the Apple iPhone. But soon after the phone launched, a series of events took place-from poorly focused television commercials to the beginning of Androidmania last November-and the handset never came close to becoming competition for Apple.

source: FT.com