HP's Strange Obsession With WebOS For Printers

ryzvonusef writes "VentureBeat's (typically unnamed) sources identifies Intel and Qualcomm as being involved in talks for acquiring the Palm asset portfolio. However, citing sources intimate with HP's negotiations, it reports that the company wants to be able to license webOS back for use in printers; it wants it so much, in fact, that the issue has become 'a crucial part' of discussions. Maybe there's something about webOS and printers that HP knows and the rest of the world doesn't."

Comments

We B OS

[alphatel]

Maybe they finally realized that the "HP Universal Print Driver" is neither Universal nor a Print Driver.
Discuss...

Re:We B OS

[VIPERsssss]

I remember when an inkjet driver fit on a fucking 3.5 floppy, had pretty much the same print quality, and didn't install a goddamn update service, system tray, and a "helper" app.

Yes, I am angry about this.

Re:We B OS

[alphatel]

webLos wobble but they don't fall down?

Re:We B OS

[jbolden]

Buy ethernet printers rather than sharing USB printers and you won't have that problem. Buy stuff designed for how you want to use it.

Re:We B OS

[sarhjinian]

This.

The cheaper printers are just that: cheap. They offload most of the rasterization onto the host PC, have no job control features and are generally awful. Ethernet-capable printers usually, but don't always, help, because printer makers are shovelling out some awful crap.

You can still get small print drivers for HP's modern printers. The problem is that those printers are expensive, but then again, so were the "Good ol' days" printers they replaced.

Here's a tip: check to see if the printer supports PJL (not just PCL) and/or PostScript (or a compatible derivative, like Kyocera's KPDL). If it supports PJL and/or PS, you can be guaranteed a) that the drivers will be small, b) that the printer will work pretty well, and c) that you'll pay for the privilege of A and B.

Re:We B OS

[517714]

Windows Update will update generic printer drivers, but if you want the drivers that allow duplex printing, multiple page reduction, high resolution, economy settings, etc. and support the other features available in a typical laser printer then you must install the drivers yourself, and Windows Update does not apply.

palm?

[galaad2]

*facePALM*

It could be a leverage point

[Chrisq]

Looking at the picture of the printer I can imagine that if HP wanted to get back in to tablets they could just have a cheap printer with a detachable control unit...

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Xest]

There's more to it than this, I have one of these printers and don't use it very often, however last night I was sat playing BF3 and notice something out the corner of my eye. The thing had switched itself on and it's front end on the tablet thing was staring at me with the blue light on the printer flashing, as if it was trying to communicate with me, as if it felt the need to make me acknowledge it's presence.

I suspect HP does know something we don't know about WebOS, and that's that it is sentient. HP understands that if it doesn't retain a close relationship now, that when these things start to learn to do other things, like walk, and weild machine guns, then it risks suffering the same kind of enslavement as the rest of us. Me? I'm not too worried, I said "there there" to my printer in a calm voice, fed it some paper, and said "time to sleep" before gently turning it off. I hope this will be enough, that if I'm kind to it now, it will spare me when the day comes.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[nedlohs]

This is the most rational explanation for HPs behaviour I've heard. Well that and LSD in the water in the board room.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Chrisq]

This is the most rational explanation for HPs behaviour I've heard. Well that and LSD in the water in the board room.

Surely the poster must be the next HP CEO.

Re:It could be a leverage point

[Xest]

That's a bit harsh, I've never had an inappropriate relationship or been accused of sexual harassment in my life!

Products in the pipeline?

[JStyle]

Maybe HP already has printers with WebOS in the pipeline, a lot of them. Losing WebOS licenses at this point could be a major loss for their development group.

Well...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

On the bright side, absolutely anything would be better than the utter shit that passes for firmware in their present models.

I had the delightful experience just the other day of encountering an HP wireless laser printer(a comparatively low-volume one; but a full 'Hi, I'm a networked device on the network' sort of thing) that would simply hang and drop off the network until power-cycled if you attempted to print to it using the HP 'Universal' print driver...

So, not only was this thing such a piece of shit that it wasn't compatible with HP's own, supposedly, 'universal' driver(PCL motherfucker, do you speak it?); but HP's own UPD could be used as an attack toolkit for a DOS that could only be recovered by a hard power cycle.

Now, if HP actually believes that there is some kind of "People who want a non-ipad with a shittastic inkjet attached, for reasons unknown to normal humans" market, I'd be delighted to sell them a bridge. If their doomed effort to build WebOS printers at least means that their network-attached printers will be running a linux kernel that doesn't fall over and die at the first sign of malformed network input, I'll be a lot happier...

I guess they don't have these in America:

[Kagetsuki]

http://www.epson.jp/products/colorio/printer/me/
Printers with screens and keyboards and built in software to print photos, greeting cards, calendars, and quite a few other things. WebOS would be perfect for one of these and I'd bet that's exactly what they want to do with it.

Re:Hah.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If only HP had invented some sort of 'Printer Command Language' back in the 80s by which an embedded device might communicate with a great many of their printers(and a fair few 3rd party ones) with no platform-specific driver...

Re:THERE BE GOLD IN THEM THAR INK CARTS !!

[SJHillman]

Ink is not toner. Toner is reasonably priced compared to inkjet cartridges, which is why there's only silver in toner cartridges. And I saw this with my hands covered in toner after spending the past hour digging through a HP LaserJet looking for a damned stuck sensor.

Re:Eh....

[PPH]

You must work for Boeing.

We had a 'paper saving initiative' many years ago. The unit chief figured it was so important that rather than circulating one memo on the topic per group with a routing slip attached, he ordered one copy made for each employee (several hundred) in his organization.

Re:Hah.

[pseudonomous]

I would like to disagree with the moderation of your comment, it is *not* funny. It is $&#*ing tragic. There was a problem "every printer needs it's own #!*& driver", there were at least two solutions, postscript and PCL that date back to at least the 1980s. But, unless you've got something fancy enough to be considered a network printer, odds are that "the printer still needs it's own #!*& driver". Postscript printers were not-so-common in the 1980's because it was computationally expensive and microprocessors and RAM were not cheap back in the 1980's, but they *are* cheap now. So, let's recap:

1. 1) We had a problem
2. 2) We found a technical solution 30 years ago
3. 3) We still have the same problem, I have no idea why.