It is no secret that HP has been struggling to compete in the mobile scene as evidenced by the heavily discounted Touchpads in the market. Now it is seeking a facelift in the consumer mobile market via Windows 8 and open source WebOS!

The company is launching a comeback with two ultra books featuring touch screens and a "hybrid PC " to compete against the mobile giants Google and Apple this time using Windows 8 along with complementary offerings in the form of cloud services.

Promising the best of both a PC operating system and a tablet, the HP Envy x2 is a tablet hybrid that features a detachable screen to be used as a standalone tablet or as a more traditional net book attached to a QWERTY keyboard. It will feature Near Field Communication technology to let users easily share content such as photos and contacts, along with a new HP app called Connected Photo that can synch photos across multiple devices.

The two new touch-enabled Ultra books are the 14-inch Envy Touch Smart Ultra book 4 and Windows 8-based Ultra books. The Spectre Touch Smart incorporates Intel's Thunderbolt USB to transfer music, data, and other content to the external devices.

HP is also trying the open source route for its WebOS platform that it acquired through its Palm acquisition in a bid to attract app developers after it stopped producing phones and tablets using that operating system. It has recently released an open source version of the WebOS in beta mode consisting of 54 WebOS components and half a million lines of code under the Apache 2.0 license.

While HP is working on a future release that includes a complete WebOS experience, the focus right now seems to be centered on its Windows 8 offerings. The success of Envy x2 will depend on the performance of Windows 8 against Android and Apple's iOS. These notebook PCs are the first HP products announced with Microsoft Windows 8. However, according to the company, additional notebooks, desktops and tablets will be announced later in 2012.

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