Phil McKinney’s MobileBeat 2010 Keynote

Source: Engadget

Earlier today, Phil McKinney gave his keynote address for MobileBeat 2010. Lets get the big stuff out of the way first. There was no major announcements of any new webOS hardware or software [Ed. Oh well]. And unfortunately, Phil didn’t “accidentally” pull a C40 out of his jacket pocket.

Phil’s keynote started decidedly low-tech. No Powerpoint here, he went with the good ol’ fashioned whiteboard and marker. With this year’s theme being “The Year of the Superphone,” Phil’s comments were rather general in nature. The majority of his talk was about the different form factors of mobile computing (smartphones, Slates, netbooks, laptops, etc.). How he related this to the Palm acquisition was in the connection of mobility and richness [of content (TV on one end of the scale, and a feature phone on the other)]. HP wanted a mobile platform that did both, and Phil said that is why they bought Palm. HP has a new appreciation for the community: application development and the homebrew community.

The only new hardware news that Phil had to give us was the fact that HP is investing heavily in flexible display technology. You can see Phil holding an example of this technology in the picture above. Think of this tech as a major evolution of the current state of e Ink. Basically, these flexible displays will be mylar sheets that will be able to display an image using little or no power. While Phil did say that this tech will be integrated into Palm and mainstream HP products, we have to think that it will be a while until this sort of thing becomes the norm. Ultra-thin, low power screens would be something that would really go a long way towards making mobile battery life much longer.

After Phil’s talk, Rich Wong of Accel Partners held a Q&A session. Most of the stuff Phil said was stuff we already knew, but nonetheless, he did have some good things to say. HP chose Palm over Android or Windows because they liked “being able to control entire experience stack.”

In discussing where HP sees webOS on the open/controlled scale, Phil came out a second time and and praised the homebrew community for the “phenomenal innovations on top of webOS” that they are making. We’re hoping that this means that the existing openness of webOS will remain as HP becomes the boss.

Last, but not least, Phil made sure to point out the fact that HP will be pouring a heck of a lot of money behind Palm R&D, and marketing, allowing Palm to scale appropriately. HP will be investing in the device roadmap.

From my perspective in having been involved with the whole team at Palm, they’ve got some great plans and some great things coming, so stay tuned.

And since there was no big announcement today, stay tuned we will. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that we will not have to stay tuned for too much longer until get some new webOS device announcements.

Feel free to add your comments about today’s event to our forum discussion.