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A few months after announcing plans to acquire Palm, HP is now the proud owner of the mobile technology company. The $1.2 billion deal officially closed today.

While this means HP now runs Palm’s smartphone hardware division, the key piece of this acquisition was Palm’s WebOS software which powers the Palm Pre and Pixie phones. HP is expected to leverage the mobile operating system for use in tablets, web-connected printers, and other devices.

Although neither Palm or HP are announcing any new products today,the press release says that the group plans to use WebOS on hardware including “a robust smartphone roadmap to future slate PCs and netbooks.” This is despite the fact that we’d earlier heard that HP wouldn’t be building netbooks with WebOS. It’s also looking more and more likely that the delayed HP Slate will indeed run WebOS if and when it launches.