HP Hires Ex-Nokia Exec, Spins Off WebOS, Reportedly Returning To Tablets 128
judgecorp writes "Hewlett-Packard is returning to tablets with a new unit that aims to make consumer devices under the leadership of former Nokia executive Alberto Torres."
This particular Ex-Nokia exec was part of the Meego division. The newly founded HP Mobility will focus on consumer tablets; 'business' tablets (presumably running Windows 8) will remain in their current division. With the recent spinning off of the webOS team into Gram this might mean new webOS hardware.
Apple is clearly doomed (Score:5, Funny)
This is HP were talking about with an ex-Nokia guy
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This is HP were talking about with an ex-Nokia guy
Add Windows 8 and Epic Fail is no longer adaquate to describe this train wreck.
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What's wrong with Windows 8 on mobile platforms? AFAIK, it's just that it's unsuitable for desktop. Not that I care about non-free OS', I'm just saying.
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What's wrong with Windows 8 on mobile platforms?
What's right about it? Why would I want Windows on a tablet rather than Android or Apple's thingy?
'Get your new tablet with the new version of Windows, where you can't even run an application in a window'.
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'Get your new tablet with the new version of Windows, where you can't even run an application in a window'.
Hey look [advancedpcmedia.com] two application windows side-by-side.
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'Get your new tablet with the new version of Windows, where you can't even run an application in a window'.
Hey look [advancedpcmedia.com] two widgets windows side-by-side.
FTFY
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Only Microsoft can write "desktop" (eg, Win32) applications for Windows RT. So that's not really much of a factor, even if it does improve the few Microsoft applications one might be inclined to run.
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It NEEDS a keyboard and a mouse/touchpad/trackball/pen to, you know, use it.
It's like the dev team said "Well, we've got the top layer of Windows mostly converted to be kind of usable using a touch screen, we're start to work on..." Manager: "We're shipping what you've got as RTM tomorrow"
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Applications, for one. On an x86 Windows tablet, you can in theory run your regular Windows applications, and whatever new UI-Formerly-Known-As-Metro applications that materialize. Of course, you'll need a keyboard and mouse for the former, and you don't care about these latter. So where's the advantage in a tablet over a small laptop here? And even those classic Windows applications are only practical if there's a boatload of storage on that tablet. I have some multimedia applications that eat 10's of giga
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On the public "beta" anyway, you can only log in with a Microsoft "passport" login -- they want you to use the Don't-Call-Me-Zune-Anymore store. It's supposedly optional for desktop, but on Windows RT, you can only buy things though that store, that is correct. And you can only by the UI-Formerly-Known-As-Metro applications there as well, desktop or tablet.
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Why? WP7.5 wasn't too bad? The thing about mobile OSes is that it isn't matter of "how many" features it has its more about "how less" features it has.
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for normal folk who like their iphones there is no reason to go WP 7.5. what does it to that the iphone doesn't?
nothing?
ok, unless its free no reason to get it
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for normal folk who like their iphones there is no reason to go WP 7.5. what does it to that the iphone doesn't?
nothing?
ok, unless its free no reason to get it
Crash frequently?
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It doesn't do that either.
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Not sure of the price myself which I don't care about as my Lumia was less RRP than an iPhone, does the EXACT same thing except with lower specced but better quality hardware. So say what you will about WP, so far no disappointments.
Here is a fairly balanced comparison between the two.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP9HlGB7Sy8 [youtube.com]
Some wins both sides I'd say. Which is better? whose to say? The weak points on Apple was video streaming and lack of HTML5, WP weaknesses the use of Trident over WebKit. But really sp
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Microsoft's only real marketing push for Window 7 Phone was selling it as the smartphone for people who don't really want smartphones.
Sure, that's an untapped market... but I think the big problem with such folks is that they don't want the extra $30-$60 per month for that smartphone. Maybe a small percentage was afraid enough of Android and iOS but would find Windows Phone comfortable, but, can it really be that many. Even if you add in disgruntled Android/iOS folks who wouldn't simply swap with one-anothe
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WP7.x has to be stripped -- it's running over the old single processor WinCE kernel, and Microsoft set standards for the devices that don't compare to mid-tier iOS or Android devices in 2012. But sure, they did a good job of KISS -- I played with a couple of Win7Phone devices. They didn't do much, and it's pretty easy to see, with the content-spares Zune-style UI, that they're not being asked to do a great deal of work. But it was snappy, and that could well be all some smartphone fence-sitters are looking
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Ahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahahahaha....
The company that rightly quit even trying, joins forces with a guy who sat atop an expensive pile of nothing which everybody knew would never reach market in any significant degree. There is probably no analogy for this outside of Saturday morning cartoons.
What the hell does Nikita put in its water fountains, to make people think these underfunded, disorganized, sloppily targeted niche projects such as meego are ever going to go anywhere but into the "miscellaneous cr
Want to see new WebOS tablet, there must be one... (Score:3)
I think it very interesting to hear that HP might sail to the island of misfit tablet OS's, and combine them into something potentially really good...
But I really wish they would commit fully to this, instead of also making a Windows8 tablet.
Now that Microsoft has shown it's happy to make it's own hardware, with potentially a very competitive price - it seems like HP should take a gamble on reviving it's own tablet OS flavor instead of trying to compete on margin against Microsoft.
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They just need to ship a 41 with a tablet sized display and multi-touch.
How fast could they clock one of those puppies these days. Microcode the OS. RPN shell language.
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Nonsense. They could surprise us all by focusing their energies on the neglected markets of desktops, by suddenly shipping full towers with extensive, user-friendly options, rekindling interest among the common folk in owning 'a Porsche for less than a Ford.' Or they could continue to follow the pack, and make some loose change.
I mean, it's not like other manufacturers aren't also slowly pulling out of the desktop market, which with the diversion in resources could allow for an upset victory. And it's not l
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But yes, let's abandon the desktop market, and switch to the lower revenue and less useful tablet market.
Yes let's not change, let's stick to our declining market that clearly people are starting to abandon and ignore the growing market segments! If we all get our heads in the sand everything will turn out ok!
And it's not like there isn't a giant market out there filled with people who don't mind owning a desktop.
Outside of professional users (and even then in many cases laptops are preferable) there really isn't much of a market for desktops, sure they "wouldn't mind" owning one, but you're only going to be competing on price, a laptop is far more useful and these days almost insignificantly more expensive. It's
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I'm sure tablets (or "consumer computing devices" to say what they really are) have a huge market ready for the taking, once you can compete with the iPad, but that doesn't mean the desktop market is ready for exploitation too - its not just professionals who need a super-powered desktop machine for development or graphic design or whatnot, but all those call-centre workers who have an underpowered PC humming under their desks. There are millions of 'ordinary' workers who have/need one.
Now, I'm sure the clo
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I'm sure tablets (or "consumer computing devices" to say what they really are) have a huge market ready for the taking, once you can compete with the iPad, but that doesn't mean the desktop market is ready for exploitation too - its not just professionals who need a super-powered desktop machine for development or graphic design or whatnot, but all those call-centre workers who have an underpowered PC humming under their desks. There are millions of 'ordinary' workers who have/need one.
^^ This. A million times this.
Now, I'm sure the cloud will come along and tell everyone they need a thin-client instead, but we're not there yet
Chances are we will never get there, for a multitude of logistic problems. We will have network-centric applications, but the idea of returning back to the thin-client paradigm, cloudy or not, I don't see that happening now or in the near/mid future.
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I can that happening already - everyone and their dog is going for web apps, web stuff is the new thinclient computing paradigm. It'd be nice to get more performance and local cached storage, but companies like Microsoft and Google see dollar signs everytime they think of Amazon's subscription server models. That's one reason the cloud stuff is growing now.
The fanciest buggy on the road (Score:3)
They could surprise us all by focusing their energies on the neglected markets of desktops
I'm sure in the waning days of the horse carriages there were buggy makers that decided to "focus their energies on the neglected market of the carriage" and build some really fancy buggies...
But it didn't help them turn a tide that was beyond any one company.
Tablets are just as useful as any other computer. But it's also not like desktops and laptops are going away, just marginalized... in a way it is better for us,
Not exactly true... (Score:3)
What does HP have with WebOS? Jack squat and everyone knows it. App developers will put a port to WebOS at about the same priority as a port to OS/2.
This is not really true. I know an interesting cross-section of app developers, both Android and iOS that all like WebOS quite a bit.
If a real attempt to push WebOS would arrive, I would spend some effort porting software to it, just to help prop up competition that I like.
MS will get apps because they are paying handsomely to have the most popular apps ported
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What is going on at HP? (Score:5, Insightful)
I cant help but think that HP are just stumbling around in the dark doing things at random in the hope that something pays off.
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Seriously. This has fail written all over it. You'd think they'd take a breather after the Touchpad. Like a 5-10 year breather.
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What's left for calculators? (Score:2)
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The problem, I think, is that the market is too small for such a calculator. I'd love to see one but given the size of the consumer market and the low profit on any of these devices (as long as you aren't Apple), it would be quite a gamble for any company. That RPN style that HP pushed in their calculators from way back is almost impossible to get out of my brain. I have a desktop calc app that implements it. The old TI infix style makes my brain seize up.
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the consumer PC and the enterprise IT market is mostly smallish companies making the tech and dell/hp rebranding it and selling it with some value added in like providing support. this is called a commodity and it doesn't really matter what you buy. it's all the same. kind of like a blu ray player
almost everything HP sells is rebranded stuff they buy from a small supplier like Emulex or Fusion IO and resell it under their own brand
companies like EMC have staked out the high more profitable end where they ca
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Exactly. HP's tablet was just a me-too product. On the other hand, HP produced some of the very best lab equipment (oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, spectrum analyzers) on the planet. If they were to choose a market to get back into, why choose tablets?
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HP's tablet was just a me-too product.
What the? There have been dozens of me-too products in the tablet space over the last several months. HP's was definitely not one of those. They had their own OS, brilliantly designed for touch computing, unique features, and a follow-up product (the 7-inch Touchpad Go) just months away from release. They had poor hardware design choices, key apps missing, and remarkably poor rollout execution; but they still had the #2 tablet within weeks of launch. And that was before they killed it all and sparked the fi
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'Cause they're the world's largest computing vendor, and computing is increasingly tablet-oriented, probably.
By what measure is HP the "world's largest computer vendor"?
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'Cause they're the world's largest computing vendor, and computing is increasingly tablet-oriented, probably.
By what measure is HP the "world's largest computer vendor"?
Personal Computer sales. What else would that sentence realistically imply?
Re:What is going on at HP? (Score:5, Insightful)
PC distribution? Yes
Obviously that one, even if you were incapable of inferring that from the original post the fact that all the other random metrics you listed don't support such a claim (and most don't even fit the definition of 'computer vendor') should tell you that the one that does (and best fits the definition of 'computer vendor') is most likely the measure in question.
Blame Lew Platt (Score:5, Interesting)
He's the one who split the company in half and infested it with the usual gang of MBA idiots while the company was ironically promoting "The HP Way" to its own employees.
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Re:What is going on at HP? (Score:4, Informative)
I left HP a few months ago for greener (less insane) pastures. From my perspective, you are absolutely correct.
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I cant help but think that HP are just stumbling around in the dark doing things at random in the hope that something pays off.
Choosing actions at random seems wiser than what HP are actually doing, as random actions have a non-zero probability of being beneficial. Instead, what HP seems to be doing is deliberately shooting themselves in the foot over and over again, in the hopes that more bullets will heal their injuries.
Re:What is going on at HP? (Score:5, Insightful)
Splitting hairs (Score:1)
Business tablets comprise are a few niche markets at best. Consumer tablets are doomed to failure.
The only reason the iPad has sold well is because of Apple's reality distortion field. No one made a commercially viable tablet before, and no one else will.
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I'm enjoying my Nexus 7. I'm also one of those people that generally mocked the idea of tablets and held off for a long time.
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Business tablets comprise are a few niche markets at best. Consumer tablets are doomed to failure.
The only reason the iPad has sold well is because of Apple's reality distortion field. No one made a commercially viable tablet before, and no one else will.
I see Thomas "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" Watson is alive and well and posting on Slashdot.
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The iPad sold well because it's a high quality product with better features and a better OS than the competition. Until somebody else can come up with something better (NOT BLOODY LIKELY considering all they are doing is furiously copying Apple) Apple will continue to own the tablet space.
People like the iPad because it's easy, and it was successful partially thanks to a very rich software library from launch.
Just pretending that Apple's success is because they magically make buy their stuff might make you
Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps Meg Whitman's underlings told her that HP's last tablet offering "flew off the shelves at Best Buy," but neglected to tell her why. I bought one for a friend who needed a new computer but couldn't afford one at the time, and as I helped her set it up and figure out how to do the things she needed with it, I realized it was a steal for the fire sale price, but it certainly wasn't worth anything close to the retail price.
Who would develop for it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who's going to develop for their new platform after what happened the last time?
For that matter, who trusts HP for anything after their behavior "Hey, we're in the tablet market, buy WebOS, it's the wave of the future!" "Oh hey, we don't want to be in the tablet market, so we're selling our entire inventory for 80% off!" "Oh yeah, and the PC market sucks, we're spinning of the division, so no more HP PC's!" "Well maybe PC's aren't so bad after all, we decided to keep selling them! So keep buying them!" "Oh you know, we were wrong about tablets, now we we're going to sell them again and we really mean it this time!"
I won't buy HP servers because I really don't know where they are going and don't want to build an HP shop, then find out in 2 years that they decided that servers are not profitable.
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That was pretty dumb from HP, launching a decent tablet with a decent OS on it, and next throwing the towel, making people investing in that ecosystem to leave and potentially to not come back ever.
In the other hand, provided that they can do decent hardware and push some innovation from their own in that area, plus the knowledge of those 2 great mobile OSs, they could still have room for some surprise (i.e. if adding to the mix running android apps in an environment that mix the best features of WebOS and
2 different divisions making tablets? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, two completely unrelated divisions making tablets. This is guaranteed to turn out well!
Why the hell is Apple the only large tech company that can get its shit together? A while back some pundit posted a bunch of speculation over who would have revolutionized mp3 players if Apple had not come along. Would it have been Microsoft or Sony or Creative? But the consensus of the responses was that none of the above would have stepped up and we would still be using crappy 2000's style mp3 players today and blackberries would still be the height of smartphones. Go e-mail!
Nothing was stopping any of those companies, or dozens of others, from making a better mp3 player before the iPod launched. Nothing stopped them from stepping up their game after it launched and the truth is that most of them still suck today, over a decade later. Apple's only secret sauce is that all their competitors are fundamentally incompetent.
Sony is famous for squabbling and hostile divisions. Each division tries to undercut every other division while developing competing ideas in parallel and not sharing any resources, while at the same time the media side of the company stabs everyone else in the back. Repeatedly. With a machete.
Microsoft's long running managerial dysfunction has been getting a bunch of public airing lately. Their method of giving performance reviews on a scale, thus forcing out 20% of the good teams and encouraging the smart teams to keep on bad workers in order to pad their numbers. While the Office division stabs everyone else in the back. Repeatedly. With a machete.
And now HP wants to do tablets again. Right after canceling their tablet plans. What do they do? Get a few dozen of their smartest people in a room and hash it out until they have a comprehensive plan that describes the tablet goals and provides for a cohesive set of feature to scale nicely from the consumer to the corporate, allowing them to cross-sell to their best advantage?
Hell No!
They set up two different teams. They are going to make two entirely different lines of tablets. They might not even use the same operating system, let alone a scaling feature set. Probably going to be completely incompatible. Already committed to one of HP's tablet lines and looking to upgrade or replace them? I'd bet cash money that it will be an easier experience to switch to iPads than switch to the other HP line.
This announcement right here is where the board should be fired and replaced and then the new board should fire and replace the entire C level.
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Why the hell is Apple the only large tech company that can get its shit together? A while back some pundit posted a bunch of speculation over who would have revolutionized mp3 players if Apple had not come along. Would it have been Microsoft or Sony or Creative? But the consensus of the responses was that none of the above would have stepped up and we would still be using crappy 2000's style mp3 players today and blackberries would still be the height of smartphones. Go e-mail!
Nothing was stopping any of those companies, or dozens of others, from making a better mp3 player before the iPod launched. Nothing stopped them from stepping up their game after it launched and the truth is that most of them still suck today, over a decade later. Apple's only secret sauce is that all their competitors are fundamentally incompetent.
Creative and others had products that beat the iPod, both before and after the iPod's launch. In contrast to the iPod of the time, my old Zen Micro played more formats of music, supported music stores that had legal DRM-free music, received and recorded FM radio, allowed playlist editing on the device, had a user-replaceable battery, etc. etc. The explanation is the reality distortion field, not the inferiority of the competition.
And now HP wants to do tablets again. Right after canceling their tablet plans. What do they do? Get a few dozen of their smartest people in a room and hash it out until they have a comprehensive plan that describes the tablet goals and provides for a cohesive set of feature to scale nicely from the consumer to the corporate, allowing them to cross-sell to their best advantage?
Hell No!
They set up two different teams. They are going to make two entirely different lines of tablets.
There's a rumor that a Microsoft license prevents HP from having the same peop
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There's a rumor that a Microsoft license prevents HP from having the same people working on Windows and non-Windows tablets. They may have to do it this way because that's the only way to hedge their bets against the possibility that Microsoft will score overwhelming success with their Surface, at the expense of OEMs.
Actually it's to ensure Apple doesn't release an iPad running Windows 8, because it would have more intuitive buttons on the surface than the Microsoft's Surface and come in better colors.
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Creative and others had products that beat the iPod, both before and after the iPod's launch. In contrast to the iPod of the time, my old Zen Micro played more formats of music, supported music stores that had legal DRM-free music, received and recorded FM radio, allowed playlist editing on the device, had a user-replaceable battery, etc. etc.
I had a Creative before (and for a while after) the iPod came out. It was only good when measured against the next option, which was burning mp3s to CD and using a portable CD player that supported them. Yeah, sure, it played more formats than the iPod. Hell, it played more formats than my iPhone probably does. But once you finished reading the box it wasn't very good at actually performing it's intended function. Loading music sucked. Sorting and organizing music sucked. Browsing music sucked. It just suck
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Having missed out on the Apple ][ days by cutting my teeth on the C64 and on DEC equipment obtain through a cousin who worked there, I've never had any attachment to Apple. The whole "computing for idiots" mantra that started with the Mac was off-putting, and hasn't changed yet. The iMac was candy colored crap, the iPhone 1 was a style-over-substance featurephone masquerading as a smart phone, the Air was a ridiculous toy, and all their other offerings have been over-hyped and hyper-inflated machines for su
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"The whole "computing for idiots" mantra that started with the Mac was off-putting, and hasn't changed yet."
You're totally missing the point. Apple doesn't, and never has, made computers for idiots. They make computers for people who want to do their work using their computers, not WORK ON their computer. The Apple ][ series was designed at a time when the next best things were all jokes, designed and built for and by electronic engineers for no reason other than to say "hey I have a computer." It was d
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"Creative and others had products that beat the iPod, both before and after the iPod's launch. In contrast to the iPod of the time, my old Zen Micro played more formats of music, supported music stores that had legal DRM-free music, received and recorded FM radio, allowed playlist editing on the device, had a user-replaceable battery, etc. etc. The explanation is the reality distortion field, not the inferiority of the competition."
No, no, no. The problem is that you don't understand the market, marketing,
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Creative and others had products that beat the iPod, both before and after the iPod's launch. In contrast to the iPod of the time, my old Zen Micro played more formats of music, supported music stores that had legal DRM-free music, received and recorded FM radio, allowed playlist editing on the device, had a user-replaceable battery, etc. etc. The explanation is the reality distortion field, not the inferiority of the competition.
On paper, maybe. But the thing is, everyone has their own priorities and it turns out "has a user interface that doesn't make me want to gouge out my eyes with a spoon" is a high priority to a lot of people, and that's something that most other MP3 players were sorely lacking.
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"The explanation is the reality distortion field, not the inferiority of the competition.", No, the explanation is iTunes. With that, it became a consumer device rather than something a geek would load from his computer and sniff with that self-satisfied superior air that makes regular folks want to go for his throat.
iPod Touch is good for anything BUT music (Score:2)
I have an iPod Touch. I use it for a number of things - except Music . I used to use an iPod Nano for music, where all I was going to do was listen. But if I have something w/ a screen on it, I'd prefer to watch music videos, not just listen to music audios (for which the Nano was adequate). But guess what - there is no way I can transfer downloaded videos in any format - be it MP4, FLV, MOV, 3GP et al to the iPod, and have them play when I select videos. I either have to enable the internet and play
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My post is still marked as flamebait. Someone must be abusing the moderator system.
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Aren't Gram just the remnants of the webOS open source project? Let them push boundaries, innovate and just let them code.
As for this new ex-Nokian led venture, let them polish the end results in terms of marketable hardware. e.g. akin to Samsung taking Google's AOSP and polishing the OS (touchwiz) for Galaxy phones and tablets.
Nothing in the announcements says Gram will actually make hardware.
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"While the Office division stabs everyone else in the back. Repeatedly. With a machete."
I have to disagree here. The Office division isn't stabbing the rest of MS in the back with a machete. After all, that'd be an effective tool and MS doesn't believe in those. What they did was take a Cabbage Patch Kid, melt the head into a narrow cylinder of goo, tape a piece of confetti onto the end, and stab the other divisions in the back with it even though it's not very sharp. They did it with sheer willpower, b
What would Bill and Dave do? (Score:3, Interesting)
Gram? (Score:2)
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In other news it was announced today that I will be producing a web tablet of my own, designed to compete head to head with all the other tablet makers. When reached for comment, I said, "Why not? Everyone else is!"
Oooh I heard of this earlier! Can I get in on the early adopter band wagon for your Big Chief tablets?! I'm a game developer, and tablets need games! I assume you'll be running Apache. You're in luck, mod_rewrite is Turing complete and I've used my .htaccess vodo to create a nifty tic-tac-toe game! Bonus: It uses Cloud Computing!
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I think you just described kickstarter.
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Hmmmmm.... (Score:2)
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WTF, HP? (Score:1)
I've never seen such indecisiveness and direction-changing in a major corporation. How are they still in business after 20 years of being completely ADHD?
They must be doing pretty well selling $80000/gallon ink..
HP deathmarch.... (Score:2)
So after coming out with a reasonably good tablet (Touchpad) HP decides that a fire sale is in order. This is before allowing WebOS to get any traction whatsoever. I still think that WebOS is the best tablet OS around. The problem is that they didn't have any apps - or not enough of them. The hardware was a bit crippled but it could have been jazzed up a bit. Now they're back in the game. Who is going to buy one of them? Who is going to go out and pay $499 only to see them slashed down to $99 a few weeks la
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You don't understand the roles of Apple vs HP. Apple is Henry Ford's Ford, a singular vision where you could get a Model T in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. HP is General Motors, where you could get any color you wanted from 7 or more brands ranging from low-end Chevrolet to high-end Cadillacs, not to mention GMC trucks and tractor-trailers. The press and financial analyst community views HP as a PC and printer company because that's all they ever put their hands on, but HP makes as much
why do i get the impression (Score:2)
Touchpad + incompatible open webos = ICS Installed (Score:2)
I bought a "fire sale" touchpad last year and I am impressed with the hardware.
WebOS was a slick OS - swipe gestures are intuitive too.
WebOS was then open-sourced - components were released in a timely manner and then the punchline - "Not compatible with existing devices!!!".
I installed cyanogen ICS (Andoird 4) tenderloin and never looked back - the only hardware that doesn't work is the camera - no big deal.
It even has accelerated GPU - I can quite happily play Minecraft PE.
Current score:
0 HP
1 Cyanogen Dev
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Office on a tablet? Everyone talks about how tablets are great consuming data devices, not content creation ones, so Office on your tablet is a silly idea - an office reader is fine, but there are loads of them that read office documents already. The familiarity factor n olonger applies anyway as Office will look and feel different to normal PC version.
MS has shown that it thinks tablets are the only way now, hence no desktop in the Windows 8 RT version. I agree, I can't see it being popular with businesse
history lesson? (Score:3)
Office on a tablet? Everyone talks about how tablets are great consuming data devices, not content creation ones, so Office on your tablet is a silly idea.
There is used to be a time, not long ago where the following (listed in reverse chronological order) were considered "silly ideas"
1. tablets,
2. phones with cameras,
3. e-commerce,
4. personal computers
Sooner or later (probably sooner than you think), technology will catch up to make such an idea (a content-producing tablet) a realistic alternative. These silly ideas have merit, and would fit a future need. I don't really care any other way, but to call it "silly", well, that's silly.
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oh, I think there's the power - after all Wordperfect ran quite well on computers with much less power than current phones/tablets. Its just the formfactor-ness of it, which requires a keyboard, and that takes it from the tablet and puts it in the world of being a laptop (which, is exactly what MS surface is - a screen with a floppy keyboard you need a table to rest it on)
One day I'm sure we'll get good enough speech recognition to really run word on a tablet, and a better UI to manage a stream of text rath
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The Asus Transformer may be an interesting idea for some businesses.
I imagine the profit margin would be very small. Maybe HP needs to do what is nearly impossible compete with an entrenched Apple and Amazon here *and* develop a near zero price tablet for for new consumers in developing markets.
All of this while there is no way to capture a second high mark up revenue stream. iTunes, Shopping, etc.
Where would you take HP if you were the CEO?
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I'd take HP into the world of servers (where they already are well known) and bring the thin client back, a lot of ideas were tried before their time - dumb terminals were great back in the day, then they were tried by the likes of Sun (but were so expensive compared to a PC), the time might be right for them to appear for real. A thin linuxy PC running either a browser OS (can't think which one - there will be several to choose from soon) that connects seamlessly to HP servers and . you have the needs of a
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Active Directory, MS Office to name a couple. Perhaps you meant Windows RT instead? Well, it's still got Office... but I don't see it being popular with businesses.
I did mean Windows RT. It wouldn't be such a bad idea if HP based their business tablets on Fusion or Medfield, thereby enabling them to at least run Windows 7 apps. But even there, I don't see Windows 8 tablet on that platform seizing back the market from iPad or Androids - they have enough established software by now, and if they simply don't break application compatibility while upgrading the OS, they'll be just fine.