HP eyes webOS sale for 'hundreds of millions of dollars'

HP is looking to offload webOS on the advice of its bank, according to the latest reports which estimate the OS's price tag at 'hundreds of millions of dollars'.
Reuters claims that the Bank of America Merrill Lynch has advised the tech company to palm the Palm-made OS off to try and recoup some of the money it lost on its foray into webOS tablets and smartphones.
HP spent $1.2 billion on Palm last year and is unlikely to make it all back.

Kindle Fire sale?

A number of companies are said to be vying for the bargain OS, including RIM, IBM, Oracle, Intel and - wildcard - Amazon.
Although webOS hasn't proven massively successful on the consumer side of things, the boutique OS was a hit with critics and comes with several juicy patents.
It'd be particularly interesting to see Amazon snap webOS up, perhaps a sign that it hopes to divorce itself a little from Google, whose Android OS it currently runs on its first tablet, the Kindle Fire.
HP's latest comments on the matter don't give anything away, however. A spokesperson said, "We are exploring ways to optimize the webOS software."
Last week, Todd Bradley, HP's VP of personal systems, said that the company is busy trying to "determine how we'll best utilise webOS and those great software assets that we have".

HTC Edge quad-core, Tegra 3 phone tipped

HTC is reportedly preparing the world's first quad-core smartphone, the HTC Edge.
According to PocketNow, which claims to have leaked images of the purported device, the Edge would boast a Tegra 3 processor, packing a whopping four 1.5GHz chips.
The Tegra 2 processor, made by NVIDIA, currently lives within the most powerful Android phones on the market and that boasts two 1.5GHz chips, so quad-core would represent a huge upgrade.
The HTC Edge in question reportedly has a 4.7-inch HD display, 1GB of RAM and an 8-megapixel camera with an LED flash, putting it up there with the top-specced Android devices.

MWC debut?

The first quad-core phones are expected in early 2012, so it would be a reasonable assumption to expect this device to appear at Mobile World congress in just three months time.
Given that time period, it's also likely that any new releases from HTC would arrive packing the new Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system.
The NVIDA Tegra 2 processor has primarily made Android phones more of a competitor in terms of gaming and graphical capabilities.
Quad-core phones could allow users of Google's operating system to experience even more iOS-like games that require a lot of power and put greater tools in the hands of developers.