HP CTO Phil McKinney just finished his speech at AlwaysOn and as expected, there were no major announcements to be had. McKinney did discuss some of the roadblocks between where we are and where we need to be with regard to mobile cloud computing – hitting on issues like the US falling behind in broadband infrastructure and companies intervening between app developers and users in oppressive ways.
McKinney also once again mentioned HP’s thinking with regard to the future of devices with those flexible displays, though he went one step further and hypothetized about separating the display from the device – ex. your connection could be your watch and you display could be a flexible display, your phone, or heck, even your entire wall as in the slide above. Who wouldn’t want a webOS Wall?
Q&A time brought a lot of questions about Palm. McKinney once again mentioned HP’s size and scale, natch, but he also pointed out that that he has given phones as prizes to HP engineers who develop good webOS apps:
Inside of HP with the 47,000 engineers I issued a challenge [...] for the HP engineers to go create apps, consumer apps [...] I stopped counting at 750 apps and my mailbox has totally exploded.
Some of those apps, by the way, have popped up in Palm’s Beta Apps feed.
McKinney pointed out that Palm does not get in the way of letting developers connect directly to their users. In fact, enterprises are free to create their own app distribution systems. McKinney also pointed out that HP supports homebrew:
We also support the homebrew guys. You hear about all the guys hacking phones and unlocking the phones, we actually encourage that. You can go out to PreCentral or any of the sites that support the Palm homebrew guys. they’ll tell you how to unlock your phone and how you can download the homebrew sites. The homebrew guys have just done some phenomenal work from the standpoint of really unlocking the true power of webOS.
Lastly, McKinney reiterated some of the points we heard last week: "We are also restating that our focus is webOS and Windows 7," meaning that Android is on the outs with HP for sure as is Windows Phone 7. He also reiterated that the Windows 7 Slate is meant solely for enterprise, HP is most definitely working on a webOS Slate device, and finally that Rubinstein wasn’t whistlin’ dixie when he said webOS 2.0 is coming.
Want to show Phil McKinney the same love he’s showing the community? He’s looking for some help creating an ‘audio brand / entrance theme’ for when he heads out to give speeches. The person who creates the best theme will win $1,000 to boot. Check it out here.
Update: the presentation video is online now.
Source: AlwaysOn & ViVu livestream.
