HP Reportedly Cancels Plans for Windows 7 Tablet

A recent post up at TechCrunch claims that HP's "Slate" tablet has been canceled. Officials details for the tablet were limited, though a leaked internal presentation indicated it had an 8.9" screen, a 1.6GHz Atom processor, and ran on Windows 7. Some are now speculating that HP may experiment with porting WebOS to a similar device. Quoting: "Will WebOS emerge as a successful operating system for tablet devices? That seems very unlikely given the dominance of the closed Apple OS and the likely success of the open Android and Chrome operating systems from Google. To get traction from third-party developers with WebOS, HP will need to sell a lot of units. And it's not clear what they'd gain from all that effort, anyway. HP knows how to build and sell hardware, not operating systems."

Re:Who writes this crap?

[jhoegl]

I see more buts than I did at spring break!

Re:Who writes this crap?

[causality]

For a portable device like this tablet if you start with an Intel Atom and add Windows 7 then performance will be poor, costs will be high, battery life will be short. The customer experience will be unsatisfactory because W7 isn't designed for tablet use and Microsoft won't let HP customize it sufficiently to make it useful.

So no, HP didn't screw this up - it was a dumb idea from the start. Its failure was built-in. But they had to show something to try and head off the iPad.

But.. nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft!

Re:Who writes this crap?

[MartinSchou]

But.. nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft!

That's not true. One place I worked the receptionist got fired after she went to the store to buy fruit and came back with ten copies of Microsoft Office.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[AHuxley]

Critical and important computer systems are what this generation, NSA and Narus?.
The rest seems to be a race to getting a MS box installed so some 'admin' can dial in and point and click from home between xbox and ps3 time.