Switched On: How HP learned to stop worrying and love Android

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Only those who were at the highest levels of HP at the time will likely ever know the full story of the spectacularly botched $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm and webOS. In the span of only eight months in 2010, the IT giant's plans for the operating system underwent a titanic turnabout -- from a foundation technology that would infiltrate every crevice of its device business to an orphaned open-source project ulti...