Palm Inc. has struggled in recent years and has been passed, first by Research in Motion, next by Microsoft, then by Apple, and most recently by Google in terms of smartphone market share.  The company finally received some good news on April 28 when the world's top PC maker, Hewlett-Packard Co., announced that it would be scooping it up for $1.2B USD.

HP's CEO Mark Hurd discussed the acquisition during the company's quarterly earnings call yesterday and said that the real key to it is webOS, Palm's recently developed smartphone operating system.  Hurd elates, "[The proposed deal] isn't precisely a smartphone play, as I've seen some people write.  It is, for us, strategically broader.  We expect to leverage WebOS into a variety of form factors, including ‘slates’ and Web-connected printers."

The first webOS tablet to hit will likely be the Hurricane, the replacement for the scrapped Slate.  There are reports that the Hurricane will launch in Q3 2010.

The switch from planned Windows tablets to webOS tablets leaves questions about how it will effect the company's relationship with Microsoft, makers of the Windows operating system.  Mr. Hurd insists, however, that everything is peachy between the pair and that his company will use whatever OS best fits the task -- which he says is webOS when it comes to small form factors.

Printers are another surprise candidate for webOS.  Comments Mr. Hurd, "It really has more to do with the intellectual property and the fact that when you look across the HP ecosystem of interconnected devices, it is a large family of devices and we think of printers, you’ve now got a whole series of Web-connected printers, and as they connect to the Web, [they] need an OS."

HP may find itself in a race with Google to become the next to market with hot tablets to counter Apple's iPad -- a race that mirror's Google and Palm's former roles with respect to Apple in the smartphone race.  And while HP is downplaying its smartphone ambitions, the acquisition will help it counter rival Dell, who is crafting its own army of Android and Windows Mobile smartphones.

Aside from Palm, one deal that HP is very pleased with is its acquisition of 3Com, a company focused on networking solutions.  Since the April 12 acquisition of the firm for $2.7B USD, HP has raked in $50M USD.  On the other hand, HP is less than thrilled with the results of EDS, a network services firm acquired for $13.9B USD.

Returning to the earnings, HP posted an impressive $2.2B USD in profits, with $30.8B USD in revenue, up from $1.7B USD and $27.4B USD, respectively, from the quarter ending a year ago.