Palm Rises From the Grave With a New Tablet!

And everyone thought Palm was turning into a dinosaur! Shame on them. Let’s be fair, though…

It was already pretty clear that with their Palm products, HP would take a dip into the tablet technology pool and we were going to see something on February 19, 2011.

Guess what — HP snapped a leaked product on us, and we had gotten a chance to see a sneak peak of the latest in tablet technology for the Palm!

Fast forward to now, and this is what you’re looking at: the ‘Topaz’ and a smaller model of the same device, codenamed ‘Opal’. Pretty sweet. Has Palm risen from the technological grave here? Remember those old Palm Pilots? Put them aside, because these new super-powered heroes are hitting the computer technology spectrum in a big way.

First off, the Topaz is this sleek 9-incher; the Opal is a 7-inch model. Here are some of the specs of HP’s new tablet devices: firstly, you’ve got a front-facing camera. Looks good. How about a micro USB port? Even better. As with all tablet technology, there are no buttons on the face of the device. None. Who would’ve thought? A Palm device without buttons….

Flashback to just this past June, and you’ll be pleased to know that these two Palm models were heavily in production. The word was the Opal itself was going to be launched this coming September, 2011 (which is only about two months away!). The brands working with the tablet would be AT&T with 3G capability, Verizon’s LTE, and also just in basic WiFi. An AT&T LTE version is also supposed to be released in July of next year. Hold onto your boots for that one.

However…. Here’s the big problem. Shame on HP for taking so darn long to jump on the tablet bandwagon! After all, if we have to wait till September for the Opal to be released, it’ll be up against some of the bad boys, like the XOOM, or the Playbook, or (to make it even worse for HP) the iPad 2! Shudder at the thought. It’s like a parallel between Apple’s iPod and the too-little-too-late Zune from Microsoft. When it comes to technology, you can’t simply ‘wait around’ until you ‘get it right.’ Strike when the iron’s hot. Or in this case, when the mother board’s hot.

Whatever the case, let’s say you’re a devoted Palm fan. Those Pilots were always so handy. So here’s what you’ve got…. Devoted web OS technology in tablet form! You can’t go wrong with that.