HP is in discussions with Intel to buy off the company's Palm assets – the most important of which is WebOS.
In a week where HP's financial numbers revealed that WebOS, the acquisition of Palm and the running costs to produce the HP TouchPad had hit $3.3 billion, it is thought that Intel is the latest to be interested in buying WebOS.
The sheer amount of cash that HP has put into its OS and tablet venture, however, does mean that when it does eventually sell off its WebOS assets it will make a massive loss.
Licence to print
While Palm is looking to sell off WebOS, one of its prerequisites for the deal seems to be that it still wants to have a WebOS licence for its printer range.
We're not sure why this would be a stumbling block for a company that is eager to rid itself of software that is losing the company money on a daily basis, but VentureBeat believes this is a major factor in the talks taking place.
2011 will be a year HP wants to forget. In August the company announced it was ending production of WebOS hardware, less than 18 months after it had bought Palm and that it was thinking of pulling out of the PC market completely.
By October, the company had a new CEO in place and had confirmed it was keeping the PC business but remained set on selling WebOS.
Intel is a company that is still reeling from the demise of MeeGo, so WebOS could well be of interest, so we are pegging this rumour as quite likely:
From VentureBeat and SlashGear
