Out of the blue, LG has announced that it has acquired the rights from HP for webOS. Under the deal, licences, patents as well as engineering talent will be acquired by the South Korean company.
Interestingly, LG is not purchasing webOS to work on powering its next-gen flagship smartphone or tablet. Instead, the company intends to use webOS on its future smart TVs, which according to Skott Ahn, president and chief technology officer of LG Electronics Inc., “creates a new path for LG to offer an intuitive user experience and Internet services across a range of consumer electronics devices.”
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While smartphones do indeed fall under “consumer electronics devices”, it could also be that LG are also interested in the patents held by HP for the webOS platform. Naturally, it is far too early to see anything concrete at the moment, but the acquisition of the platform certainly marks a new twist to the ill-fated platform.
