HP and Palm are holding a big event this Wednesday, February 9th. Both been historically known for showing off fantastic technology that they are still developing or even just considering developing. Unfortunately, they are also known for never bringing those items, like the Palm Foleo, to market, and for bringing them to market so late, like the HP Slate, that they are already irrelevant. However, ever since the formerly struggling and weak Palm was bought by the benevolent, behemoth that is HP and became HP’s Palm Global Business Unit, both have been playing their hands a little closer to the vest. Recently hired HP CEO, Leo Apotheker, has made it clear that HP is gonna play it cool from now on. The days of announcing a product many months before the product is ready to roll off the production lines are over. HP plans on having their products ready to ship within weeks of the upcoming announcement on February 9th.

HP and Palm have been doing their best to keep a weary fan base excited while keeping their employees’ lip’s locked. When a little bit of information did manage to squeeze its way out of their vice grip, Palm was quick to brush it off with a laugh. Palm has also been teasing us with  poetic humor and more recently with what could only be called a peep show. See the video below. Don’t worry, it’s rated G.

So, the question on the minds of those following the news out of Sunnyvale, CA is “What is HP going to announce on the 9th?” HP has said that they will definitely launch a WebOS tablet in 2011, so we’ll likely see some sort of tablet device. Other than that, it’s anyone’s guess. Their tagline for the event, “Think big. Think small. Think beyond? leaves a lot to the imagination; it doesn’t promise anything, and yet it promises everything. Will Palm fanboys and girls finally get new phones to run their beloved WebOS on? Will WebOS finally catch up with every other major smartphone OS and get a Kindle, Netflix, Nook, and/or Hulu app? Will HP announce something that will change the mobile market in such a major way that it will make the iPhone announcement in 2007 pale in comparison, or will we find out what I believe many WebOS fans are secretly dreading: HP was really bluffing the whole time. We won’t know until February 9th at 10:00 AM PST. Until then, we’ll have to wait. For what? We don’t know, but we hope it’s something amazing.

For those of you that belong to the uninitiated masses, the card analogy that was beaten to death in this article is, of course,  in reference to the gorgeous, intuitive user interface that is the keystone of HP WebOS (formerly Palm WebOS). HP WebOS is the operating system that runs the Palm Pre and Pixi and all of their later iterations and will be in whatever new device(s) that HP announces Wednesday. HP WebOS is arguably the only mobile operating system that is currently on the market that allows you to really multitask, i.e. run two or more programs at the same time. While iOS finally has the ability in versions 4 and above to allow some things to run in the background, WebOS has always allowed multitasking. (iOS is the operating system in all of the i- prefixed devices made by a certain fruit company) Also, the way that cards work on WebOS is what is truly amazing. Instead of having to use some awkward combination of button presses and waiting for the app to “wiggle,” to open a new app in WebOS, you simply tap the center of the gesture bar at the bottom of the screen. The app then shrinks to 3/4 of the screen and looks like a little card. Then, you can search for the app you want to open. After you have two or more apps open, you can slide back and forth between them easily. Watch this video and see how easy it is:

Royal Flush image by Marc Wellekötter via Flickr. Image mashup by Ray Hollister.

UPDATE: PreCentral.net is going to be live blogging the HP Palm event, and webOSroundup is having a webOSGatherup in San Francisco.