Hewlett-Packard confirmed on Wednesday that it had acquired Melodeo, its second recent acquisition in the mobile market.
Melodeo offers a service, called NuTsie, that essentially lets people stream songs that are in their iTunes collections to a mobile phone. A user first exports iTunes playlists to NuTsie online. After downloading an application to their phone, they can start listening to their playlists.
My sense is that HP is moving aggressively as possible into the consumer cloud. With it's strong new touch screen models, and Palm acquisition of WebOS, HP is looking to create an entire WebOS based hardware and cloud based consumer services ecosystem to rival Apple.
- Printers will use WebOS on their inbuilt touchscreens.
- HP printers will migrate to wireless, and be internet enabled as standard. Connect your printer, connect to wifi, and print from any wireless device to the printer through cloudprint
- HP will start to use WebOS on it's Slate tablet device, just like Apple uses the iPhone OS on the iPad.
- Possible conflicts with Microsoft could arise as it becomes more and more obvious that Windows may not be the user interface of choice for the new mobile computing paradigm
- HP touchscreen PCs may migrate to a WebOS/HP Touch combination
What is key in this new ecosystem, is that the interface becomes completely transparent to the user. iPhone users like myself already understand this: Reading the iPhone manual is a waste of time, because the OS is so utterly intuitive that a manual is largely uncessary.
Windows is still a far cry from user interface intuition, and Microsoft is appearing less and less able to close this gap. If you've every used the interface on a Windows mobile device, you'll understand why. My windows mobile work phone sits in the drawer at home - I use my iPhone for work calls if necessary because its just so frustrating to use the clumsy, menu based system.
Peter is an HP employee, but not involved in printer/web/PC strategy.
