Huh? I thought...No wait...Ok, what is going on here?

Former Palm CEO and Palm Global Business Unit head Jon Rubinstein has left HP effective today, according to a new report from AllThingsD. Rubinstein joined HP as part of the company's purchase of Palm, leading the Palm Global Business Unit as in the lead-up to the TouchPad launch. He was then shifted into a "SVP of Product Innovation" role within the HP Personal Systems Group, a position that we expected was a sort of ease-out job for Rubinstein.

Rubinstein joined Palm in 2007 as Chairman and led the development of webOS and the Palm Pre, which launched in 2009. Soon after he took over as CEO from Palm veteran Ed Colligan. In 2011 HP announced their plans to purchase Palm, bringing Rubinstein into the HP organization in the process.

Then not that long ago HP pulled the plug on webOS device hardware. We can imagine it was a devastating blow for Rubinstein, who had invested years of his work into building the platform. According to AllThingsD, Rubinstein hadn't been seen at HP or Palm since the decision had been made. Can't say we're surprised - we'd be pretty disenchanted if that happened to us too.

We've reached out to HP for comment on the matter, but in the meantime we'll say this: Jon, we'll miss you. You've had a substantial impact on the mobile space for many years, one that will be felt for some time to come. We don't know where you're going from here, but if we had to guess, it'd be to that hammock that Colligan dragged you out of back in 2007. Hope we'll see you around!

Update: We just heard back from HP on Rubinstein's departure, here's their official comment on the matter: "Jon Rubinstein has fulfilled his commitment to HP; we wish him well." We've also heard that HP is not aware of any plans that Rubinstein has to go to another company (or start a new one with Open webOS - wouldn't that be delicious?), so we'd guess that the hammock, pitcher of margaritas, and Mexican beach sand are definitely in Jon's future.

Source: AllThingsD

If you have missed one of the multitude of chances to pick up an HP TouchPad, here's one more: HP has put a batch of refurbished TouchPads up on deal-a-day site Woot, though you might find yourself taken aback by the price: they want $169.99 for a 16GB TouchPad and $219.99 for the 32GB version. That's for used-but-HP-refurbished TouchPads, not new, and not part of a bundle.

For comparison's sake, when the TouchPad fire sale first kicked off, HP was unloading brand new versions of the tablet for $99.99 for the 16GB and $149.99 for 32GB. Are we more than a little dismayed that HP and Woot are asking significantly more for used merchandise than they were for new merchandise just a few months ago? Yes, we certainly are. But at least each comes with a 90-day HP warranty, and it's still significantly lower than the launch price of $499.99 and $599.99.

Are the TouchPads a good deal at this price and condition? Well, that’s up to you to decide, but it’s practically the only way you’re going to get a ten-inch tablet priced below $200. In fact, they’re still practically the only tablets you can get for under $200, regardless of price – the only others being the e-reader-purposed Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook Color (we’re ignoring on-contract cellular-enable tablets for purposes of the exercise, considering that you’ll pay much more over the long-term). They’re also the only webOS tablets you can purchase, but what kind of future they have to look forward to is still uncertain, though at least looking up. So is a $170 refurbished TouchPad the tablet for you? If you don’t already own a tablet and you’re looking for one on the cheap – go ahead and take the plunge, but it’s going to be around today only.

Source: Woot (16GB, 32GB); Thanks to everybody that sent this in!

We've been giving Picsel major props over the past few months for their Smart Office document editing suite on webOS, and for good reason - they've succeeded in building a robust and comprehensive document, spreadsheet, and presentation editor for the full line of webOS tablets and smartphones where the genre heavyweights were unable to. And you the reader have bestowed your blessings on Smart Office too, anointing it the Best webOS Productivity App of 2011.

While we're still waiting for the upcoming update for the smartphone version that will add GPU acceleration and PowerPoint Autoshapes, Picsel has seen fit to give those that haven't jumped on the document editing train a bit more in the way of incentive - they've cut five whole dollars from the price for Smart Office for smartphones, bringing it down to a manageable $4.99. Considering that Smart Office is the only document editor available for webOS smartphones, they probably could have gotten away with raising the price, but they didn't, and that's not a bad thing at all.

Source: App Catalog

With yesterday's release of the Enyo development framework as Open Source, webOS developers now are able to take their existing Enyo code and repackage their apps to work on other platforms such as Android, iOS or even directly in the browser. Almost immediately after the Enyo open source announcement, we saw two webOS Enyo apps released on other platforms with Paper Mache on Android and FlashCards basically everywhere you have a browser. As luck would have it, Ryan Watkins, the developer of Paper Mache, was sitting next to me at the NYC webOS Developer meetup last night and I had a chance to discuss his thoughts on Enyo going open source, the overall porting process and what work he still needs to do to make Paper Mache

For those that don't know Paper Mache, it's an Instapaper client app that includes offline and background syncing, saving and syncing of your position in the article, and a multitude of preferences to make reading your articles a pleasurable experience (check out our App Review of Paper Mache for more info). After using the webOS app on the TouchPad and my Pre3 for months, my initial reactions to Paper Mache running as an Android app were extremely positive. I loaded it up on my TouchPad running Android CyanogenMod 7 and despite a little sluggishness, it worked extremely well. It looked and felt exactly like the Paper Mache that I have come to know and love, with two notable exceptions. First, instead of swiping down from the top-left to access the Application menu, I had to rely on the Android menu button in order to access it. And second, power-swipe (two-finger swipe) was absent from the app. Aside from that, it was Enyo in Android!

So how hard was it for Paper Mache to make the transition from webOS to Android? It turns out it was actually pretty easy and took less than a week to do, all done in his spare time, although Watkins said he could have done it in a day if he had time to just focus on that and not worry about "real life." The toughest part, in fact, was the learning curve of first getting familiar with PhoneGap, getting the Android SDK, learning what plugins were available and how to submit an app to the Android Marketplace, and then figuring out what needs to be done to modify the code to work on Android. Which, as it turns out, was very little coding for his version 1.0 port. Out of thousands of lines of existing code, he needed only to add a few dozen new lines, but that is what took him the most amount of time to figure out. As it turns out, webOS and Android aren't the same! The implementation of WebKit isn't the same between the two, the diversity of device sizes and resolutions is different, nor do they multitask the same way.

But, after a few days of modifying his code, Watkins was able to get Paper Mache running on both Android phones and tablets with relatively decent performance. He still needs to work on further optimizations of the code to remove some of the lag. He hopes future versions of Enyo will be able to provide a better optimized end result and that the need for these performance tweaks won't be as necessary. In addition, he still needs to figure out a way to ensure that Paper Mache can reliably perform background article sync, a hurdle thrown up by how Android multitasking differs from webOS.

Bottom line, though, is that in just a few days, Ryan was able to port his webOS Enyo app to Android and said that it would probably even take half the time if he were to do it again now that he is familiar the basic process of how it works. So if you want an amazing Instapaper app on Android that will also sync your reading position to your webOS device, check out Paper Mache.

And if you are a developer interesting in learning more about this process, you can find Ryan on twitter at @PaperMacheApp. Or you can also reach out to James Harris, the developer of FlashCards for his experiences - he's also on twitter at @erupnu has even set up some forum posts on the new EnyoJS forums to help port your Enyo app to iOS, the Chrome Web Store or for Windows Desktop.

As we touched on when talking about the revised expectations and hopes for webOS, there's something interesting right at the very end of the open source roadmap: the September release of "Open webOS 1.0". What exactly is this mysterious Open webOS and why are we going to be back at version 1.0? That's the question we posed to HP, because we don't like ambiguity (we've had enough of that over the years). Here's how HP clarified Open webOS 1.0 to us:

“The 1.0 release of Open webOS will include many new features, technologies, and enhancements, benefitting from HP’s ongoing development of the code. This work will also have the effect improving performance on a variety of hardware.”

We're going to deduce from this that Open webOS 1.0 is the combination of two things. The first is the set of modifications announced today (the new standard Linux kernel, switching to JavaScriptCore, etc - and likely more to be unveiled in the coming months) that will make it easier to put webOS on other hardware and aid in the open source process. The second part is webOS 4.0, which we're sure has been in development in some shape or form but with a questionable future. Open webOS 1.0 will combine those, giving webOS a second relaunch effort from HP.

In 2009 the dream of webOS and the Palm Pre was a successful web-based mobile platform with full-featured apps built with web code. It was an ambitious dream, but it came packaged with a flawed plan and debilitating lack of resources. The idea of building apps with just HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and a sprinkling of custom code seemed so obvious and yet something that nobody had yet grasped.

There's a reason nobody had yet grasped it - it's not easy. Sure, programming in HTML isn't exactly rocket surgery, but building an OS to support solely those apps is a more difficult proposition. It took webOS a while to get its footing, too long, in fact.

Today the dream has been revised. webOS is still at its core based on web technologies, but the dream is of those web-coded apps being everywhere and breeding success back down to the to-be-open-sourced webOS. Today's open sourcing of the Enyo application framework was the first of many steps to fulfilling that dream, and it's a pretty big one. It didn't take long after the announcement for Enyo-based apps to find their way into our browsers and other platforms, and we imagine that's just going to be the beginning. There are plenty of well-built Enyo apps that we're certain developers will be excited to be able to bring to other platforms without much effort (at least compared to the effort of completely rewriting the app for other platforms).

Today was really all about Enyo. Having the roadmap for the webOS open source release is great and all, but it's just to set expectations. We now know what we can look forward to in the coming months (ha, gotcha!), but at least in our estimation the most interesting item on the list was the very last one in September 2012: Open webOS 1.0.

This is not HP going back and pulling webOS 1.0 out of the vaults and open sourcing it. Nor is this HP dialing down the version number on 3.0 and shoving it out to the public. As we discussed last month after HP's announcement of their open source plans, there's plenty of work to be done with regards to open sourcing webOS. And today we got a glimpse at some of that work, such as adopting the standard Linux kernel for distribution onto more devices with better driver support and switching to JavaScriptCore over V8. These changes weren't just made with "going open" as a concern, in fact we wouldn't say that was a concern at all, though certainly a nice bonus as a result. The idea behind these changes (and likely plenty more to come) was to make webOS hardware agnostic - more like Linux and Android.

The revised dream is that by making webOS a new alternative to Android they might be able to pick up some marketshare in the process, making it easier to justify bringing back webOS hardware from HP. That's part of why HP's reseting the version counter to 1.0, and maybe pulling off a rename here to Open webOS (though personally we're still likely to just call it webOS if that's the case).

That's the dream. Now if that will be the reality, that remains to be seen. But at least today's news not only puts us a step closer, but also makes it an actual possibility. An open source application framework is one step, but we have to hope that Open webOS 1.0 takes massive leaps ahead, because that's exactly what the competition is going to be doing too - and they have hardware to back it up.

In announcing Enyo as open source and launching the new enyojs.com site, HP also posted six previews of Enyo web apps for your browser. Some are pretty basic, like the Enyo Playground code demonstrator and apps to search Flickr and YouTube. But there are two that are somewhat impressive.

The first is StyleMatters, an Enyo-styled app (sliding panes and all - it looks straight out of a TouchPad) that shows off in code all of the kind of things you can do with Enyo as far as the user interface is concerned. Because, well, style matters, and Enyo will now get to spread webOS style to plenty of other platforms. In fact, it's already started.

The second demo is Pirate Pig, an app build off of HTML5 Canvas and Enyo that's essentially and extra-cute Bejeweled. Pirate Pig isn't full of fancy graphics but it works just as a Bejeweled clone should. Plus it's just adorable.

There's also the earlier discussed FlashCards by the indomitable James Harris, which in addition to working as an Enyo app on your TouchPad works as an Enyo app in any WebKit-based browser. It's good stuff, and we love that it syncs your data across multiple platforms.

Both of these apps exist entirely in the browser and we've tested them in multiple browsers on our computer and with a TouchPad. Unsurprisingly, they work great on both. Are we maybe a little excited about this? Yeah, though "little" might be an understatement.

Source: Enyojs.com (StyleMatters [WebKit browser required], Pirate Pig), FlashCards To Go

With new frameworks comes a new logo. Technically neither Mojo nor Enyo had a logo before, but that's because they fell under the rubric of webOS. Now that Enyo is open source, however, it need an identify all it's own. That's where the brand new Enyo logo comes into play.

HP worked a whole lot of symbolism into the logo, though at first glance some it's not so obvious. There's the big E, which is kind of a duh. But the angling and three-dimensionality of the E also gives it a military chevron appearance, a nod to Enyo, the Greek goddess of war. The overall shape is a badge/shield meant to resemble the HTML5 logo (though they stole orange away from Palm here). The three-blocks stacked design for the E is also meant to invoke the modularity of the Enyo framework.

Most blatant is the font, which is nicely rounded yet squarish in a direct and clear homage to the Palm logo of yore. Overall there's been a lot of thought put into a logo that not a log of people are going to see. With so much though put into the logo, we can't wait to see how much has been put into the rest of the Enyo and webOS open source project.

Source: The Verge Forums