Palm division of Hewlett-Packard plans to release the first smartphones based on webOS 2.0 operating system in early 2011. This will revive interest towards Palm cell phones and will also demonstrate whether and how HP influenced the development of the next-generation webOS platform.

"You will see us coming early next year with new phones," said Eric Cador, a senior vice president at HP, at a press conference, reports Reuters news-agency.

When originally announcing the completion of the Palm take over HP said that it planned to release smartphones, slate PCs and netbooks featuring webOS. Later on the company downplayed the importance of smartphones and indicated interest in putting webOS onto a variety of connected devices, including printers. Nonetheless, it looks like smartphones and a slate-type personal computer will be the first devices to feature the new webOS platform early in 2011.

After taking over Palm earlier this year, HP did not release a single new smartphone and naturally low market share to Google Android platform despite of the fact that Palm Pre and Palm Pixi generally received farly positive reviews.

Last week Palm said that it had dropped all plans to release smartphones based on Google Android and other competing platforms, which leads to believe that HP will concentrate heavily on development of webOS to make it more competitive against rivals Apple iPhone, Google Android, Microsoft Windows Phone, Samsung Bada, Nokia's Symbian, Nokia/Intel MeeGo and so on.

Tags: Palm, HP, webOS, Andoid