HP's Rubinstein Says webOS 2.0 Coming Later This Year

When HP acquired Palm earlier this year, the webOS community feared the end was in sight. Within days of the acquisition, however, HP put any fears to rest by confirming that it had no plans to abandon webOS or Palm's smartphone business. Instead, HP said that it planned to put webOS in a bunch of other devices such as printers and tablets.

Recently, Jon Rubinstein, former Palm CEO, dropped a casual mention of an updated version of webOS — version 2.0 — at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference. What's even more interesting is that he said it would be coming “later this year”.

At this point, we don't know a whole lot about what webOS 2.0 will contain, but it's good to know that Palm's mobile OS is still kicking. The current version of webOS sits at 1.4.5. Most of the changes from the initial release until now have come by means of periodic updates that have included bug fixes and other tweaks. The last major update (webOS 1.4) came in February and delivered the ability to capture and edit video as well as a few other features.

Besides mentioning the upcoming availability of webOS 2.0, Rubinstein also mentioned the company is working aggressively on new hardware.