HP moves MediaSmart in with Palm to boost multimedia in webOS

Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday that it will move its multimedia and streaming unit MediaSmart Server into its Palm division to deliver better media and entertainment apps to newest versions of webOS.

"We'll put the MediaSmart Server team's multimedia and entertainment application experience toward developing the WebOS ecosystem," Marlene Somsak, an HP spokeswoman, noted. The decision comes as no surprise after Microsoft killed support for multiple hard drives on a single server for its Windows Home Server OS recently. Drive Extender, as it was called, was one of the key features of WHS and MediaSmart relied on Microsoft's operating system for its business.

MediaSmart Server was the team behind programs for remote streaming of media, as well as media collection and conversion applications. On the background of Apple's recently launched AirPlay and AirPrint features, does this mean that we might see similar functionality in webOS soon? We could only guess, but we can be sure that media support will be better in webOS 2.0 with both Flash Player 10.1 and HTML5 for video streaming.

HP is pushing the effort in the mobile devices market as the sector grows in a quick pace and webOS could still compete as the third most popular mobile OS. Palm's webOS is projected as a universal OS for not only smartphones, but also tablets and printers.

source: PC World

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