According to VentureBeat, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was looking for a company to buy its Palm/webOS division for $1.2 billion, the same price it acquired Palm for in 2010, for the past several months. This means that HP was looking to sell its Palm division without any losses from when it bought the struggling mobile company one year prior. 

The $1.2 billion asking price shines some light on a story we heard from another source: At one point, HP’s team tried to pitch the sale to Facebook but was practically laughed out of the room. At first, I attributed that story to Facebook’s side being a bit obnoxious, but I can’t blame them if HP was indeed asking $1.2 billion. And yes, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was present at the meeting, although he apparently didn’t say much (I’m sure whatever he was thinking at the time would have been gold).

HP announced back in August that it would be discontinuing all webOS-based devices and axing the webOS division because of poor performance and sales. After a couple months of debating, the company reversed part of its decision and elected to keep the webOS division, but make the mobile platform open source to the world. Devices are still out of the question for the near future, but HP CEO Meg Whitman says that webOS-based tablets may be coming down the road.