There was a rumor floating around saying that HP was entertaining the idea of selling off its PC business, and that Samsung was the most likely candidate to fork over the required cash. This struck us as odd for a couple of reasons. For one, HP's PC business appears to be doing well, and secondly, the OEM recently said all new PCs shipped next year would be capable of running webOS, a decision the company made in order to attract more developers to build apps for the webOS platform. Turns out there was good reason to be skeptical.

Don't let it be said that Hewlett-Packard isn't ultra confident in webOS, the platform it inherited (and chased after) when it acquired Palm. HP head Leo Apotheker made some rather bold predictions about the future of HP, which includes shipping every PC with the ability to run webOS in addition to Microsoft's Windows. This isn't a far off future either, but next year.

As far as Hewlett-Packard is concerned, Research in Motion's PlayBook tablet hits awfully close to home. Never mind that the PlayBook sports a 7-inch screen compared to the TouchPad's 9.7-inch display, it's the PlayBook's operating system, powered by QNX, that reminds HP a little too much of webOS. You could say the similarities are uncanny, and in fact those are the exact words HP's Jon Oakes, director of product marketing, used when comparing the two tablets.

Riding the success of it's iPad tablet, Apple has leapfrogged ahead of Hewlett-Packard in both mobile PC shipments (10.2 million) and mobile market share (17.2 percent), according to data by DisplaySearch. Apple now sits on top, ahead of not only HP (15.6 percent), but also Acer (14 percent), Dell (9.9 percent), and Toshiba (8.6 percent). Note that Apple's 10.2 million shipment number includes both iPad and notebook sales.