Samsung CEO: We will "never' pursue webOS

IFA 2011: Future looking bleak

2 September 2011 10:02 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Samsung’s CEO, Choi Gee Sung, has said that the company will "never" pursue a deal with HP over licensing the company’s webOS platform for its smartphones and tablets.

The comments, made at IFA in Berlin, Germany, is likely to be a blow to HP if it were looking to do such a deal with the South Korean company.

"It’s not right that acquiring an operating system is becoming a fashion," Choi said to reporters. Samsung, which has its own mobile operating system called Bada, is working to boost its software capability "harder than people outside think."

That leaves just HTC, possibly Facebook, and little else if HP is hoping to claw back some of the $1.2Bn it spent buying Palm in April 2010.

Last month HP said that it was stopping production of all its webOS devices, although has since confused consumers by selling off the remaining HP TouchPad stock for $99 in the US and £89 in the UK.

After saying that it was pulling out of hardware, it’s then said that it still believed there was a strong future for the webOS platform.

That future is starting to look bleaker by the day.

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- HP TouchPad review

Via: mobile.bloomberg.com

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Phones, Palm, HP, Samsung, webOS, IFA2011, Operating Systems, Biz