HP hints that February 9 event will feature WebOS, tablet

While the company has not yet directly come out and said that its planned event in San Francisco is tablet-related, it sure looks like it will be. In an interview with Maria Bartiromo of CNBC, HP personal systems chief Tom Bradley seemed to suggest WebOS would be the topic.

Bartiromo asked Bradley, "where's your tablet?" His initial response was that the company would have a "set of announcements" on February 9 around the topic of Web OS, although when asked later about how HP would catch up to the bevy of tablets released at CES (where the interview was taped), he responded "you and I will talk about that on the 9th."

It seems like HP's tablet was delayed outside of the realm of CES more by choice. With dozens if not hundreds of tablet devices launched at the yearly confab, there's a good chance that the company's entrant would seemingly get lost in the long list of announcements.

Bradley said that the company wanted to focus more on the platform, which a gadget show like CES is somewhat preclusive to. He also called WebOS itself one of the key strategic reasons why HP purchased Palm in July of last year.

The operating system is much like its name suggests: a web-based platform which is light on memory usage -- allowing for true multitasking -- and is very much gesure driven, making it a pefect mobile platform.

Furthermore, the tablet may not be the only WebOS device that sees the light of day next month, if Bradley's statements are to be taken at face value. "We believe that the tablet is one piece of that ecosystem, one piece of the [always] connected experience that we are going to create," he told Bartiromo.