That didn’t take long for brand new speculation to surface.

Brian Humphries, HP’s vice president of strategy and corporate development, set some tongues wagging during the conference call about the HP acquisition of Palm. Hold on, back up: If you don’t already know the big news, HP has agreed to purchase Palm. That alone is a whopper of headline news. (For more on that, click here.)

Then Humphries kinda sorta alluded to something heretofore never actually uttered in public: a WebOS tablet. In truth, it still wasn’t uttered here, even in this conference call. But here’s what has the webs buzzing about the possibility:

Slide 5 from the presentation (below) features the Pre Plus, Pixi Plus and HP’s Slate tablet. The next slide spotlights the major strengths of each company. For Palm, it’s the WebOS platform and industry experience, whereas HP offers cashflow and “scale.” That last word is what analysts are zeroing in on. It could be taken to mean that deploying the OS across different hardware platforms, both small and large. Now let’s take another look at the previous slide…

That’s it. One word, one slide, a load of cash, and now people are wondering whether HP might eventually unveil a WebOS tablet.

For the record, my initial thoughts are that it would truly be awesome. WebOS, despite being an elegant and user-friendly operating system, has taken a lot of flack over its hardware. Now imagine all those cards swiping by on a big glorious screen set in a beautifully built device.

It’s way, way too early to know if this will be in the works, but I hope HP is licking its lips, thinking about it. What about you? If a “Phablet” ever sees the light of day, would you go for it?

Via: PreCentral