Chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard said that the interest towards devices powered by the webOS operating system developed by HP's Palm division exceeds the company's expectations. The technology giant also reiterated plans to utilize the webOS across the range of its devices for consumers and businesses.

"We are all excited about our webOS platform, the devices that we announced and the incremental opportunity that webOS provides. The enthusiasm and the anticipation for webOS exceeds even our most optimistic expectations. We look forward to providing a differentiated seamless experience across our tablets, smartphones, printers, PCs and future form-factors," said Leo Apotheker, chief executive officer of HP, during a conference call with financial analysts.

So far HP has announced TouchPad tablet and two smartphones that utilize the latest version of webOS operating system. It is also known that the company is designing at least one printer equipped with a slate device featuring webOS platform. The firm has also indicated plans to install webOS onto netbooks and various emerging types of computers.

Unfortunately, since Palm smartphones are not very popular on the market, it is hard to judge about the success of the whole webOS platform among software developers. Primarily, the interest towards the operating system is limited not by convenience of development tools, software marketing models or anything like this, but the popularity of devices based on the webOS.

"We have been working with the developer community to build up the application ecosystem and are pleased with the progress so far. WebOS provides a differentiated platform that, over time, will redefine the user experience across HP's device solutions from consumer to enterprise and from smartphone to tablets to other devices," said Cathie Lesjak, chief financial officer of HP.

So far the integration of Palm into HP seems to be proceeding smoothly and without major issues that could undermine the success of webOS and HP. Nonetheless, in the past ten years HP has already lost the popular iPaq product line of personal digital assistants from Compaq (and transform it into smartphone business in the middle of the decade) and did not manage to sustain VoodooPC's boutique PC business.

Tags: HP, webOS, Palm, TouchPad