Fortune has put together another list of names they want to recognize for excellence, and this time it was the smartest people in the technology industry. Executive Vice President of HP’s Personal Systems Group, and Palm chief Jon Rubinstein’s immediate supervisor, Todd Bradley grabbed the title of Smartest Executive on Fortune’s list (smartest exec is not to be confused with smartest CEO, a title unsurprisingly claimed by Apple chief Steve Jobs).

Bradley is a familiar name to Palm fans, as he was CEO of PalmOne (the hardware arm of Palm) from 2001 to 2005 during the transition to the smartphone, at which point he was recruited by Hewlett Packard CEO Mark Hurd to head up the Personal Systems Group of HP. Since taking charge of the Personal Systems Group, Bradley has taken the desktops, laptops, and mobile devices arm of HP to new heights. They’ve toppled Dell as the world’s largest and jumped to $42 billion in annual revenue with a 300% increase in profit.

Reading the tea leaves, Bradley sees the future of HP and the Personal Systems Group in the mobile ecosystem. As such, it’s ironic and humorous that as the head of the Personal Systems Group, Bradley will once again be in charge of newly-acquired subsidiary Palm, Inc.

Bradley finds himself on the list with such tech luminaries as the aforementioned Steve Jobs, Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple designed Jonathan Ive, analyst Mike Arrington, and film-maker James Cameron (for his pioneering 3D cinema work).

Source: Fortune, Via: webOSroundup

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“If we don’t talk about it, they’ll forget we ever mentioned it…” Or at least that seems to be the attitude that HP has been displaying towards the Windows 7-powered Slate tablet they unveiled six months ago at CES. Harry McCracken of Technologizer spoke to HP Personal Systems Group CTO Phil McKinney about their tablet plans, and the HP exec said that he wouldn’t be commenting about unreleased tablet products until the Palm acquisition was complete. And then he went on to extol the virtues of webOS over trying to adapt existing operating systems for new uses (Windows 7 onto a tablet).

This “not talking about the Slate” is a major departure for HP, as the device was shown off on stage by none other than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and featured in several videos on HP’s site. Including one with McKinney. Since then, as Engadget notes, HP has been eerily quiet – breaking out only to put a damper on rumors that the Slate would run webOS: "Don’t believe everything you see online."

So, is Slate dead and to be succeeded by a webOS-powered tablet, perhaps something codenamed Hurricane? That wouldn’t surprise us, though we doubt we’ll know for sure until sometime after the Palm acquisition is wrapped up on July 31st. If Palm and HP really are on an aggressive, 2010 schedule to release a webOS Tablet, let’s hope that they started working to make webOS Tablet-ready quite awhile ago.

Via: Engadget, Source: Technologizer

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