The deal between LG and HP includes the webOS source code, documentation, websites and what’s remaining of the webOS team. Cloud components such as the webOS app store technology as well as all of the patents will remain with HP, but are going to be licensed to LG. There’s no word on the purchase price.

Most of LG’s smart TVs have been powered by the company’s own app platform, which was originally called NetCast and has been ripe for a refresh for some time. The company also has an ongoing partnership with Google to sell Google TV devices, and in fact has been expanding this partnership in recent months.

LG started to sell two high-end Google TV sets in 2012. In 2013, it will come out with a total of seven models. But consider how LG CTO Skott Ahn announced these models at the company’s 2013 press conference:

“We will continue to serve our Android fans with an extended lineup of Google TV.”

In other words: LG’s Google TVs are, at least for now, niche products for enthusiasts, and LG apparently doesn’t think that will change anytime soon. That’s why the company is looking to replace its own smart TV operating system with webOS, instead of relying 100 percent on Google TV.

That’s bad news for Google TV, but it also shows how Google’s living room play has been changing over recent months. Google originally courted a number of big TV manufacturers for Google TV, with the idea of having the system embedded in a wide variety of TV sets. Sony was one of the first to make Google TVs, LG came on board for the second generation, and Samsung seemed to be ready to go Google as well by early 2012.

A year later, things look very different: Samsung’s Google TV never materialized. Sony stopped selling Google TV sets and instead opted for a companion box. And now, LG is buying its own smart TV operating system.

Does that mean Google TV is doomed? Hardly. The platform has seen some significant adoption in recent months: Asus, Netgear, Hisense and TCL all showed off new Google TV devices at CES, and WD is apparently working on its own Google TV box as well. Earlier this month, a total of 20 hardware partners came together in Seoul to collaborate on the future of Google TV.

But it looks like Google TV settling into a role as a companion box solution, as opposed to a default smart TV choice for the big manufacturers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
• New challenges for the IT organization
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Turns out, the possibility is slowly becoming a reality: Phoenix International Communications is getting closer to running webOS on Android with a single tap. The effort is considered “pre-alpha” so it’s not even close to ready for prime-time. But, as shown in this video, the proof-of-concept project proves it can be done:

Without hardware acceleration, the webOS environment is super-sluggishly slow, of course: You’re not going to run this now and get the performance of webOS on native hardware. Still, this is progress, says WebOS Nation, which notes that in mid-October, the team at Phoenix couldn’t even get past the lock screen.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016

When HP decided to open source some of its webOS assets, I wondered what might become of the effort. Clearly, I wasn’t thinking enough of the tinkerers out there that port software to new smartphones and tablets because those very folks have wasted no time in getting Open webOS on at least three devices already.

The low-cost Raspberry Pi — a small, $35 computer with an ARM chip and various other input/output components — is already running on the Open webOS platform, courtesy of an enthusiast known as “aaa801.” The system boots into a terminal console on the Raspberry Pi as there wasn’t a user interface available at the time of the project. But HP surely has an interface: The company ported Open webOS to an HP SmartTouch computer, building a desktop-like version of the webOS environment:

Need more proof that webOS is gaining a second, third or fourth life? The versatile Galaxy Nexus smartphone already has a working port, although hardware acceleration isn’t up to speed. As a result, the operating system isn’t what I’d call usable by a typical smartphone user. But it looks nice – see the video here — and shows what could have been had HP maintained its hardware efforts from the Palm purchase. HP has recently said it would be getting back into the mobile market, but my suspicion is that it will do so with Microsoft Windows Phone as the primary system.

Last up — for now, anyway — are reports of the Asus Transformer Prime being the latest Open webOS device: The Android tablet has a work-in-progress version of Open webOS that sounds promising, mainly because the Prime has a keyboard dock to go with the touchscreen tablet. Again, like the other ports, there’s a ways to go before folks can easily install the new platform on a Prime and run it without fear of crashes or other issues. Still, progress is being made in short order.

So what’s to be gained here for fans of Open webOS? I’m thinking of a system that’s similar to Google Android in that it can easily be tweaked and installed as people see fit but without the backing of carriers. That second point is a good one in my eyes. Carriers still have an abundance of control over which mobile devices and platforms are supported. If Open webOS maintains or increases its momentum, it could be the platform where users are in control. Not the majority of users, of course — most people still like supported ecosystems and devices — but for a select group, Open webOS will continue to live on and on.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• The connected planet: Smartphones aren’t the only player
• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

A new division, headed by Saar Gillai, is charged with weaving the disparate pieces of HP’s cloud strategy and together, according to the report which cites an internal HP memo as its source. One of HP’s problems has long been that it fields a diverse and sometimes incomprehensible array of products and services. That may have been fine when HP was top dog and could sell anything. Now, that lack of clarity is a serious problem for a company that’s been trying to downsize its way to profitability. (HP will cut 29,000 jobs before October 2014.)

Update: Gillai will report to Zorawar Biri Singh, SVP and GM of HP Cloud Services, according to a CRN report posted Monday night. CRN cited what appears to be the same internal memo.

If true, this news shows that Whitman, who took the helm at HP just over a year ago and initially pledged to stay the course while she sorted things out, is taking charge of this cloud effort.

It’s hard to gauge the take-up of HP’s ambitious cloud effort. It rolled out the public beta of its OpenStack-based cloud in May but things have been quiet on that front since. That is probably not good news

HP has been hurt by what can only be called a dysfunctional board, a series of strategies and CEOs that are introduced then jettisoned, and what some say is a counterproductive dependence on Microsoft. It’s hard to tell at this point whether tweaking its new cloud strategy is the right thing to do or just another stopgap measure.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user  drserg

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of India’s IT services
• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data

“Our new Mobility Global Business Unit initially will focus on consumer tablets and will expand to additional segments and categories where we believe we can offer differentiated value to our customers.”

HP’s Todd Bradley shared news of a new business unit in an internal memo tipped to The Verge. Alberto Torres, former EVP at Nokia and once in charge of the company’s Meego platform, will head up the unit. His first initiative, according to Bradley: “accelerate our tablet strategy and begin to execute products against our consumer/SMB target.”

I’m almost dumbstruck on the timing of this. First: What global strategy does HP even have? It gave one up — along with $1.2 billion — when it bought Palm in 2010 only to produce one tablet that it soon cancelled in 2011. The company this year open-sourced Palm’s webOS platform. Bradley is likely talking about Microsoft Windows RT and Windows 8 tablets, but HP isn’t even one of the first hardware partners for Windows RT.

Given HP’s history in the mobile market, all the way back from PDAs through smartphones, and later, tablets, this move reeks of desperation. And the sad thing is: the company that knew that the mobile market was important enough to invest $1.2 billion into it, only to see all of the “differentiated value” of the deal disintegrate like mid-morning fog over the San Francisco Bay.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The connected planet: Smartphones aren’t the only player
• A Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016

Enthusiast site Liliputing took the plunge by installing the CyanogenMod 10 software on a TouchPad and I’ll be doing the same as a future weekend project. Why would I wait? Well, this is still a work in progress and there are key functions not yet working: no microphone, camera or audio yet, and the graphics aren’t quite right, so no online video support yet.

Here’s a look at what does work, which might be enough for some to take the early plunge.

Based on the video, I’d say Google’s “Project Butter” to improve performance is working as advertised. I already knew this from my use of Jelly Bean on my Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7, but the TouchPad is older hardware. You’d never know it from the demonstration, though.

Some TouchPad owners will surely pass on this early Jelly Bean build, but I still think it’s worth keeping an eye on if you own the tablet. The Android community typically doesn’t back down from the challenge of getting Google’s mobile platform working on various devices. I’m looking forward to seeing how this develops since my TouchPad essentially sits on its wireless charger acting as a full-time clock and part-time web browser in our kitchen.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The connected planet: Smartphones aren’t the only player
• Is there a tablet market, or is it just an iPad market after all?
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate

The project, which is being dubbed “Open Web Devices,” uses the Android Linux kernel but has an entirely new layer on top that puts HTML5 in the spotlight. It’s essentially a complete phone system run on web technologies that gives the on-board software access to core APIs through an embedded version of Firefox. That, in turn, means all apps on the phone essentially run in the browser.

While the proof of the pudding is in the eating — and the devices themselves won’t be out until later this year — the big question has to be whether the world needs another mobile operating system.

For consumers, the answer is decidedly unclear. They’re already fleeing a multitude of setups toward the top of the chain, in the sort of tectonic shift that has left long-term players like Research in Motion and Nokia all at sea.

For operators, though, it could actually make some sense to back this scheme: rather than be cut out entirely of the revenue loop with customers almost entirely (as has happened with Apple and Android ), they can potentially be a greater part of development and therefore win a slice of revenue from apps and other additions. That’s great news for the likes of Telefónica, the world’s third largest operator, and the owner of major brands like O2, which has been having a tough few years.

But can it really work?

Remember, this approach has been tried before — sort of — by Palm, which developed it’s own webOS as a way of using a suite of web technologies to power the handset. For all the plaudits that initiative won the company (our own Kevin Tofel was a fan), it simply couldn’t stop the company’s slide — which eventually ended with a fire sale to HP, which then promptly underwent its own internal crisis, let Palm wither and saw senior staff such as Jon Rubinstein leave.

And although HP shopped webOS around to try and offload it, it was ultimately unsuccessful. And with nobody taking the bait the company considered shutting it down completely, before finally taking the move to open source the system just before Christmas.

That is not to say Mozilla’s effort is doomed to failure. The world, and web tech, has moved on significantly since Palm launched webOS, and Mozilla has a different structure — and different incentives for success. But the smartphone market’s incredibly crowded already with iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry all trading blows. What do these Open Web Devices need to do to stand out?

Article corrected to OWD is based on the Linux kernel, not Android.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter
• Development strategies for the app-developer community
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate