While Steve “OLETSDOIT” Jobs deals with the tragic kingdom of technology assembly known as Foxconn ; the sex, drugs, and rock andor roll story of the lost iPhone prototype; or why he is THE business genius of the world; there’s other, more pressing matters at hand. HP did not buy Palm to be in the smartphone business—come again?

HP CEO Mark Hurd had the bright idea that they didn’t acquire Palm for some rinky dink entry into the world of Droids and iPhones. No, no they wanted Palm for WebOS! Yes, yes, kill the bastard smartphone and watch Palm’s CEO Jon Rubenstein cry endlessly. Sounds like a move out of Micro$oft’s early playbook. Hey Jon, that $1.2B that you thought was a life raft? It was actually those $5 arm floaties—partially deflated and filled with orange soda (and not orange Crush, but Shasta). From here on out Mark Hurd is known as the Smartphone Nazi—no phones for you!

So here’s what ran through my head as a side eye of massive proportions started to form on my face: why buy a company for literally A BILLION DOLLARS (#Dr.Evil) just to say, oh those devices that you originally intended WebOS for? Not happening. “We wanna use that high falutin’ IP of yers and put it on other things. You know like tablets, netbooks, and Hello Kitty alarm clocks/toasters—that’s the ticket!”

Then again, what’s the point of HP trying to resuscitate product lines that seem to fail? Why waste money on it when the obvious, more lucrative idea would be to outrightly own the piece of Palm that has shown true success? WebOS. The Palm Pre, albeit charming and actually much underrated is like Luigi. Yeah the phone can do much more than most and is faster—but no one really cares. It’s not the star. Verizon’s ongoing fire sale of the Pre and Pixi proved that (a capable smart phone for peanuts AND free mobile hotspot service!?). Regardless of why or what logic was used to make decisions like this, the end result is the same. People are pissed.

A short ride on the Angry Tech Person Train brings us to our next stop: Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T. People have been sending him emails about the amount of suckage AT&T is currently brewing. After blustering endlessly about how they will do something to fix the sheer weak sauce that is their network, AT&T debuted with new data “plans”. The long end of the stick is that there will no longer be a $30 unlimited plan; instead there will be a $15/mo 200MB plan or $25 2GB plan. This is clearly for the iPhone because NO one is using that much data on a GoPhone. The short end of the stick is the new and licorice flavored ETF fees that are now in full effect: cancel your service on your iPhone early and instead of paying $125—it’s now $325—surprise! I bet you won’t try to jump ship to the Verizon-rumored-iPhone now! Well you can try…maybe borrow Jon Rubenstein’s floaties—that’s the ticket!

UPDATE: 6.4.10 8:30am
Since the writing of this post, HP CEO Mark Hurd has backtracked a little on the “no smartphone for you!” idea. Here’s his comment:

When we look at the market, we see an array of interconnected devices, including tablets, printers, and of course, smartphones. We believe webOS can become the backbone for many of HP’s small form factor devices, and we expect to expand webOS’s footprint beyond just the smartphone market, all while leveraging our financial strength, scale, and global reach to grow in smartphones.

So there you have it. He’s using marketing speak to say they are not abandoning making smartphones under the Palm banner…just that they want to port over WebOS to other products too…Like Hello Kitty T-1 Calculators.

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