HP Reportedly Cancels Plans for Windows 7 Tablet 181
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."
Who writes this crap? (Score:5, Insightful)
"HP knows how to build and sell hardware, not operating systems."
MP/E and HP-UX are what? Chopped Liver?
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Re:Who writes this crap? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It looks like Dell [zdnet.com] started on the right foot.
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But.. nobody ever got fire
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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.
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I know you were going for funny and got it, so I get the joke and I'm not hateful. You had to dig back a quarter century for that.
For those who don't remember: Once upon a time IBM owned computing. They owned the datacenter and the IBM PC was the only PC. It was not until their dominance in the field was threatened by challengers that the phrase "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" became common. It's an '80's reference. It was the end of IBM's dominance in the datacenter. Once the salespeople had
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50% bigger screen than Apple's next-gen iPhone [androidcentral.com] that was leaked, (4.3"), and yet it's still a smartphone, Small enough to fit comfortably in one hand, unlike the iPad.
HDMI out, runs flash, works as a hotspot for up to 8 other devices, Yes, it even does pinch-to-zoom. And at 4.3", it's got 50% more surface area than the current iPhone (and the leaked iPhone's screen is even smaller).
A tablet's too big to just shove in your poc
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The EVO is definitely not an iPad killer.
Have you even used an iPad before?
Take this from someone who will be getting the EVO the day it's released but also has an iPad.
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Sprint network? For those times when AT&T has just too damned much coverage. Looks nice enough, but irrelevant in the US. And no, I don't really give a shit about the world market, even in our 51st state.
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Ow, no doubt. A screen slightly bigger than the iphone, exactly what we have all been asking for.
Wake up, this device will be nothing, along with the 100 other copies of the iphone that go nowhere.
This isn't even aiming at the ipad market.
Fuck, you are so dumb, you are a danger to life around you.
Normally I agree with you (Score:2)
Barbie, you've got some good insight and usually I agree with you. But not today.
I'm getting old. I really like using RDP and Citrix on my iPod Touch. Really, I do. And I'd like to read books and watch movies on it too. But the screen is too small for my elderly eyes even with the best glasses I can get. I need something... bigger. Bigger pockets I can get. Good suits will tailor any pocket you want, or in informal environments you can go with cargo pockets or a Safari vest. I've seen iPad pocket de
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We do? For RDP, I guess I can see it. But I'm not a happy camper if I'm forced into using that to begin with. And command line activities on a touchscreen sound about as close to hell as I can imagine.
I travel all the time. Just tether my phone to a netbook, or laptop, and I'm good. But I'm bringing one of those two things along for a reason, the keyboard and real operating system on it.
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Atom serves it's purpose. (Score:2)
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Mobile Safari sucks. It sucks a bit less than the default browser on an Adroid Archos but not by much.
A lot of the what makes an iphone/ipad interesting is not the multitouch but they attention they've put into coding the UI.
Adapting a real browser to any variety of touchscreen shouldn't be that hard. The company that does it just has to care
about the end result and bother to do some genuine use case testing rather than focusing on the flim-flam. A few killer
apps that are bundled with the iphone itself acco
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>Mobile Safari sucks. It sucks a bit less than the default browser on an Adroid Archos but not by much.
Yes. Most of the UI stuff on the iPhone / iPad is great, but Safari is really almost broken in my view - at least for my browsing style. My N1 is way easier to use for general browsing - to the extent that if both are in easy reach when I'm on the couch I generally reach for the N1 with it's tiny screen instead of the iPad with it's giant screen. Simple things like opening a new window - on the iPad
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almost all modern netbooks run win 7. i have one, and as much as it pains people to hear this it actually works quite well. performance is acceptable and battery life is excellent.
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Nine hours of watching movies? Cause I'm serious, I spent around 10 hours watching netflix streaming and ripped movies on this iPad.
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There hardware slipped a lot in the 90s. I new a guy who started to work for them as an engineer and we talked about how their pcs at the time were utter sh*t. I don't expect much has changed as of late. They generally score pretty low in the reliability ratings. Yeah, this tablet had me about as excited as an enema. Compaq/HP laptops generally seem to do the worst, so what does that tell you. I know my Acer isn't far behind (and it is pretty crappy and cheap to be honest), but it still is running just fine
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When I owned it, I was pretty frustrated with the fact that their internals would give up so quickly (I think I had to exchange my motherboard after a year of use, and my screen soon afterward because a few yellow areas popped up on it). However, I suppose that this is standard ope
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All this because we can't benchmark nor really demonstrate quality. We can benchmark features, we can benchmark speed. Ease of use, and trendiness can kinda be demonstrated, but quality is a very opaque characteristics.
If we knew beforehand that PC#1, at $500 will last 2 years, and PC#2, at $600, 3years, we'd probably go for #2. But we can't. It seems that these days, even historically higher-quality manufacturers (HP, Apple, Sony...), even for their enterprise or premium consumer products, are sacrificing
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Well, I can say that workstations from the big boys may be even better made today than 10 years ago, but we're talking $3k to $6k computers. I've had recent Dell, Lenovo, and HP workstations and they're all very well put together. They're even pretty easy to access to add cards, RAM, drives, etc., which had not been a strength of Dell workstations in the past in particular (lots of strange cabling, plastic pieces you had to snap off and couldn't snap back on properly, sharp corners, etc.).
It isn't so hard
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HP went after the Dell, cheap as anything market. This how they managed to regain the crown for most PC sales, by selling big cheap boxes to corporate world.
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Is that where they treat you if you OD on viagra?
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Wow, obviously two great and consumer friendly examples.
Re:Who writes this crap? (Score:4, Interesting)
MP/E and HP-UX are what? Chopped Liver?
Both are very well established and stable OS's (I've worked with both), but they aren't "consumer" products (unless you happened to buy the "like new" HP-3000 from Prof. Frink's garage sale).
Over the last several years the people at Palm created good software that was delivered on marginal hardware and sold via substandard marketing. HP has the hardware & manufacturing and marketing know-how to re-establish Palm's software lines. The real question is going to be "can HP bring the Palm name and/or technology back to the marketplace in time to be successful?"
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Over the last several years the people at Palm created good software that was delivered on marginal hardware and sold via substandard marketing.
That depends on what happens to the people who used to work at Palm, and whether HP's corporate arms can leave them alone long enough to let them do what they do. From my knowledge of corporate businesses, they'll be strangled in bu
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Funny you should say that - we've had HP-UX machines since 95 (and before that Prime mini's) at the community college I work for (used to run Datatel/Colleage on Unidata). We actually have a HP Mini someone could take home with them. Its PA-Risc based, about the size of a fridge but its free for the asking.
(current HP-UX machine in case anyone is curious is a rack mounted Itanium machine).
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MP/E is dead.
" The discontinuance of the product line was announced in late 2001 with support from HP terminating at the end of 2010. A number of 3rd party companies have announced plans to support both the hardware and software beyond this date for customers unable or unwilling to migrate to alternative platforms."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Multi-Programming_Executive [wikipedia.org]
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See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Arrington [wikipedia.org]
The Western Union thing is impressive, you'd think a guy of this stature would have a clue about enterprise IT and know that HP is quite a powerful player in the higher end of the market.
It looks like the one of the IT companies he was apart of has seemed to of foldera-ed [foldera.com] :)
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The thing is, HP isn't building this OS. Palm is still alive as a branch of HP. They're still writing WebOS. Palm has quite the history of writing Mobile OSs. I think they're pretty great at it, myself. Web OS is a fantastic product.
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So you agree, obviously. I mean, who the hell would pay for MP/E or HP-UX?
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I'll stand behind that statement, hp-u IS barely an operating system.
At any rate anyone that didn't see this coming after the palm buyout must be blind. It will fail, consumers don't need another mobile os given there are three good choices with MS bleeding along at 4th place.
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If you haven't heard of HP-UX (pronounce it like you're coughing then spitting) you're a fucking grade A spaz.
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If you haven't heard of HP/UX then you are "merely a consumer".
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(pronounce it like you're coughing then spitting)
That's usually how I pronounce "Windows".
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you mean, back in the DEC then Compaq days ?
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And it wasn't owned by HP back in those days when it was quite popular...
Also their handhelds didn't run HP software...
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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.
This thing does not exist (Score:2)
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It probably exists as a prototype at HP. The real issue is that it didn't work as well as HP and MS wanted it to work, and it may have still been in an early stage of development. With the Android tablet rumors and the upcoming iPad, they needed to deflect attention away from alternatives. So they mocked up what they wanted to do. Now this has been modus operandi for MS for a long time.
And it worked. Everyone I know who read or saw the Slate was excited about it. However some of them didn't really und
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Call me stupid if you like, but isn't that an expensive way to kill interest? I mean this thing made it all the way to manufacturing prototype - that's not cheap.
Plus I'm pretty sure MS was on board - since they showed it off at several keynote's.
The real story... (Score:5, Interesting)
The real story about HP's purchase of of Palm is that now they have access to versions of Linux that run on everything from their SuperDome Supercomputer all the way down to cell phones. It's been the dream of HP for a long time to have one operating system that runs across the whole range of hardware that HP sells.
So I can see they would cancel the Windows 7 based Slate, and will probably replace it with a WebOS based Slate. Contrary to the obviously less than clued in article says, it's all Linux, be it Android, Chrome or WebOS.
ttyl
Farrell
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But is it? When you have three completely distinct ways of writing applications, would you still count them as one OS simply because they have the same kernel? Would you be running a glorified browser, like ChromeOS, on a SuperDome Supercomputer?
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...now they have access to versions of Linux that run on everything from their SuperDome Supercomputer all the way down to cell phones. It's been the dream of HP for a long time to have one operating system that runs across the whole range of hardware that HP sells.quote>
Your point is valid, but rather simplistic. Whilst all *nix OS have certain similarities, they are far from being the same...
The system and end-user requirements are vastly different between a SuperDome and a tablet.
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But I am not talking about flavours of *nix, but Distributions built up Linux. Remember, Linux is *only* the kernel, everything beyond that is a Distribution. So Distros all have the same low level interfaces and system calls, assuming they are using a similar vintage of kernel.
But the same kernel you run on a nPar or vPar of a Superdome is the same kernel you run on a Palm Pre, just with different options enabled.
ttyl
Farrell
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that runs on everything from their SuperDome Supercomputer all the way down to cell phones.
It's been the dream of SCO for a long time to have their operating system rented across the whole range of HP hardware.
Dell coming out with Android Tablets (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets (Score:4, Insightful)
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They are both pretty decent OS, but Android has a huge used base, 30,000 applications, and better developers. Plus android runs on 100s of devices now.
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Because Android survived, WebOS didn't.
I can already feel the flames of the WebOS fanboys but hear me out.
WebOS had a short series of incredibly bad decisions that lead to it being stillborn, the application development framework was inferior to that of Android and Iphone, they were late in releasing an SDK and I'm not sure if they ever released an NDK. The original plan was to have applications as web apps, which doesn'
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I guess it gets complicated in a tablet - preferably a device a bit smaller than a netbook; a bit, but in non-trivial way: you either get from Intel some much slower Atom (hence performance suffers) or the battery won't last acceptably long.
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Windows 7 works great on my 1005ha Eee (Aero all on, and used everyday),
Maybe compared to UNR on a mini laptop but, how about a Slate computer with an arm cpu and dedicated touch screen OS along with over 100,000 applications of more or less quality designed to work with it? Think about your Eee. That thing have a fan on it? The competition doesn't. Is it always cool to the touch? The competition's is. How much does it weigh? The competition's is significantly less than 2 pounds. And that's with 10 hours of battery life. How much battery life would your machine have if
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my netbooks runs win 7, it's snappy enough, and has 10 hours of battery life. oh and it cost 1/2 the price of the cheapest ipad. people that don't own win 7 netbooks should stop making comments about how win 7 doesn't work on netbooks. as much as this upsets you, it works quite nicely. you don't have to take my word for it. netbooks are selling like hotcakes and almost all of them run win 7. if it really was an usable, slow operating system that wouldn't be the case.
yeah it doesn't have a touchscreen and we
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You don't get it.
I'm sure that in your opinion, Win7 runs acceptably well on your little laptop.
people that don't own win 7 netbooks should stop making comments about how win 7 doesn't work on netbooks
People should stop saying I said things I didn't say. Nice attempt at a strawman though. My point, and you proved it here:
yeah it doesn't have a touchscreen and weighs over two pounds.
those are tolerable attributes for your mini laptop but are a non-starter for a slate. You have to realize that Apple is setting the standard with the iPad. It's selling like gangbusters and now people's expectation of what a slate should be is sub 2 pounds, always cool to the touch, no f
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I'm sure that in your opinion, Win7 runs acceptably well on your little laptop.
yes, in my opinion, which means a lot more since it's based on this little thing called an observation. as opposed to your opinions, which are based on your irrational hatred of windows. but don't take my word for it, read the other posts in this thread where people said the same thing as me.
p.s., you are coming across as much more of a fanboi than i did. we own a linux laptop, a mac laptop, an iphone, and android phone, and a w7 netbook. if you had to peg me as a fanboi, it probably wouldn't be windows.
p.p
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i couldn't be bothered to read most of your fanboi ranting
Of course you didn't. It disagrees with your presuppositions and the little reality you've built around yourself. And we can't have that now can we?
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i have the excellent HP tm2 tablet with an Intel SU7300 and 4Gb of RAM running Win7. after tweaking my
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Flash runs better on an Atom than it does an iPad.
Also, the crappiness of Flash on an Atom is grossly overstated. The main problem on an Atom is unaccelerated video. Even then, it's only the 720p stuff and above that's really a problem.
Win7 may have it's problems but at least it has a proper video acceleration framework that wasn't just released last week.
The whole "adobe likes to drop the ball" argument works a lot better for Windows.
Not So Sure (Score:5, Interesting)
I asked someone at HP about this on Friday, and this was her answer...
Heads up on your Slate post to me this morning. I had to delete it! I flagged the rumor to our team and they asked me not to comment on it at all. Not that I said anything either way about the status of the slate, personally I thought it was laughable, but they said they wanted to manage the rumors and not want anyone to address it. I should hear something back soon and when I do, I'll share it.
If the PR team is planning to "manage the rumors", I'm hesitant to believe that the rumor is accurate. After all, if HP was really killing the Slate, why wouldn't they want word out as soon as possible, or why would they care about managing what's said?
One of the other rumors going around is that they're ditching Win7 for WebOS on the tablet, but the hardware will stay mostly the same. That's possible, but I'm wondering what the benefit would be to them if they already had a Slate ready to go with Win7, but opting to ditch it just because of the software. Personally, I've been hoping for a Win7 tablet for some time now, and there's been plenty of other positive feedback from the idea on HP's Facebook page. I'd rather see them put two SKUs out whereby the software was basically the only difference. The WebOS one would be cheaper and likely have better battery life, but the Win7 version could run desktop apps. It'd be trivial to do, but I guess we'll have to wait for the official word.
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I could see how they'd want to manage it in the sense of "let us put it off until we have the slicky material for what we're doing in two years time" from the PR team.
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I asked someone at HP about this on Friday, and this was her answer...
Heads up on your Slate post to me this morning. I had to delete it! .....
If the PR team is planning to "manage the rumors", I'm hesitant to believe that the rumor is accurate.
It sounds like what your heard about the PR team was in fact a rumor itself.
Re:Not So Sure (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I'm reading this exactly the opposite way - if HP were not killing the Slate a simple response would be sufficient, something like - "Of course no. That rumor is ludicrous. We are still shipping the Slate in the already announced timeframe."
On the other hand, if they are "killing" the Slate and, say, replacing it with the same hardware but running WebOS, they probably need time to assess how much time will that take, or whatever, so they can come out and say - "We are killing the current Slate device if favor of releasing so-and-so in six months."
I may, too, be reading it wrongly, though. Probably it's best if we don't assume either way until HP comment on the matter or release the device.
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I don't think it would be trivial at all if HP wants to sell a great device that can be favorably compared to the iPad.
There are two major sticking points, to my mind:
One: WebOS is heavily dependent on swiping. Swiping back, swiping up, pinching, etc. I can't imagine a tablet that hasn't been designed with this in mind being physically comfortable to use.
Two: WebOS is a much more "lean" OS compared to Windows 7. Using hardware designed for WebOS will likely cost much more than it should and battery usage wo
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There was a working prototype for the Slate at CES that ran Win7, so it's safe to assume that a set of hardware specs for that platform are more-or-less nailed down. That said, the two basic options are to either get WebOS to work with the existing hardware (i.e. hammer out some drivers to get the two talking), or redesign the hardware to include tablet-sized versions of the hardware it's already been written for.
While at first glance it seems like a wash as to which is more economical for HP, support and m
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Are you really seriously considering two tablets, one for Win7 and one for WebOS, with the same hardware? That would be...incredibly stupid on the part of HP. WebOS can run on much simpler, much cheaper, much more energy efficient hardware.
Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years (Score:5, Informative)
FTA: "HP may also be abandoning Intel-based hardware for its slate lineup simply because it’s too power hungry. That would also rule out Windows 7 as an operating system." The Intel Atom has barely improved over the past two years. For the first year, it was paired up obsolete chipsets (945G, 945GSE), and only recently has Intel improved on that with Tiger Point. Still, the core has not changed (at least, I'm not aware of any announced changes), it's still manufactured at 45nm. When Intel announced their push to 32nm, many people speculated that the Atom would be the first to be manufactured because of it's simplicity. I guess it just wasn't profitable enough: Atom won't go 32nm until the second half of 2011 as Cedar Trail. The upcoming dual-core (dual die?) Atom netbook processor (N455) expected this summer will help, but it's probably too little, too late.
ARM and their partners, on the other hand, are barreling ahead. Single core Cortex A8 designs nearly reach performance parity with the Atom at about 1/4th the energy consumption, and dual-core A9 designs are being demonstrated now. (Nvidia's Tegra 2 comes to mind.)
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First ou say this:
The Intel Atom has barely improved over the past two years.
then you say this:
recently has Intel improved on that with Tiger Point
You are talking shit, Atom keeps improving, now they have dual core running at less wattage than the single core chips.
The problem is, that this is still overkill for a slate device, if you are running a decent OS. Windows 7 is not a decent OS.
Re:Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years (Score:4, Informative)
Intel doesn't really want the Atom to improve. They don't want to give up any of the Atom sales to AMD, but what they really want is for everyone to buy more-expensive and more-upscale Intel CPUs such as Core Duo or i5.
Their problem is the Tegra 2. This is an 8-core chip that draws tiny amounts of power and yet is overall more powerful than the Atom. For half a Watt or less, you get an ARM 7 core (probably for "housekeeping"), two ARM 9 cores clocked at 1 GHz (with out-of-order execution and dual issue) for data processing, audio and graphics accelerator cores, video encode and decode cores, and an image processing core that can support a camera. This thing can decode HD movies in real time without even using the ARM 9 cores for anything!
The Apple iPad uses the Apple A4 chip, which is believed to be basically an ARM 8 core at 1 GHz. ARM 8 means no out-of-order or dual issue. So the iPad has a single 1 GHz core and a graphics accelerator, and it can already give a pretty good user experience; just think what people can do if they get multiple cores all working at once with the Tegra 2.
The Tegra 2 plus Android (and plus a Pixel Qi screen) is the combination to watch. Microsoft can't be happy; they want everyone to license the mobile Windows stack, but Android is both compelling and free, so that will be hard to compete with.
Intel can't be happy, because they have no way to keep the Tegra 2 from eating into the Atom market share. "Smartbook" computers and tablets will be better with a Tegra 2 because they will dissipate less heat (no need for a cooling fan) and use less battery life while getting more work done than is possible with an Atom. It's win/win/win, but you can't get it with Windows 7, you need mobile Windows or Linux, and it's going to be Linux (Android).
If Intel made a dual-core Atom on the 32 nanometer process, with an appropriately low-power chipset, not only would it go into netbooks but companies would start making desktop computers out of it. Why not? Get an "Energy Star" logo in the USA and sell them as "green" corporate computers or thin clients. Performance wouldn't be quite as good as a Core 2 Duo, but more than good enough, and Intel would be making less money because the margins are thinner on the Atom. Intel won't want that... (Remember Intel putting limits on how good a netbook can be? Screen can't be too big or touchscreen, can't have too much RAM, etc. Intel is trying to protect the market position of their mobile processors above the Atom.)
steveha
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ARM 8 means no out-of-order or dual issue.
Correction: ARM Cortex 8 does mean dual issue. I apologize for the error. (I was correct about the lack of out-of-order execution.)
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a8.php [arm.com]
Also, I think I was remiss in not mentioning that the Tegra 2 is only available in small (prototype) quantities right now. But I believe the first Tegra 2 devices will ship within the next 3 or 4 months.
steveha
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The "power-efficient" Atom has a TDP of 2.5W (i.e., the same as the entire consumption of the iPad). That CPU alone, in other words, has about five times the power consumption of the entire ARM A8 SOC.
As the AC wrote, the Atom improvements are in the chipset. The old "low-power" 945-based chipsets were systems with an 11.9W TDP, while the new ones cut that way down to 5W. That is indeed a big improvement. But it's still ten times the ARM competitor. The N400 series switches to a SOC design too, but pow
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Different chips for different purposes - the largest of which being support for the x86 instruction set and all the OS and application support that comes along with that. Going forward, running Windows will be a less important feature (a sea change I welcome with open arms!) but for now it is still quite important.
Indeed the new generation Atom CPU is very similar (although it now has the memory controller on the CPU as opposed to original FSB architecture), but it's more appropriate to consider the Atom pl
Apple knows how to sell computers not phones... (Score:2)
"HP knows how to build and sell hardware, not operating systems."
And Apple knows how to sell computers, not phones, or music, or books. Oh wait...
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Apple knows how to sell Apple - they've gotten very good at it over the past few decades. A few missteps back in the 90s, but nothing that really tanked their image. If anything, a few of their missteps (like the Newton) played into their image even as they flopped in the market.
HP, on the other hand, never really realized that branding was important. They know how to sell hardware, but they have never been really good at selling HP as a brand. Which means it will be much harder for them to expand into
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They know how to sell hardware, but they have never been really good at selling HP as a brand.
HP has a pretty solid brand reputation in the corporate and engineering spaces. And even a bit in the consumer space when it comes to laser printers.
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If anything, a few of their missteps (like the Newton) played into their image even as they flopped in the market.
Give me a break! It's easy to backwards-rationalize now that you know Apple is a huge success.
Also, Newton wasn't its only set-back. There was Cyberdog, eWorld, the Claris suite, the Motorola ROKR, Pippin, the future looking flat 20th Anniversary Mac, Mac TV, Next, Macintosh Portables, and Apple Lisa. The only difference between HP and Apple is the market they were both used to be aiming at, and it's only recently that HP has been entering the consumer market (which has traditionally been Apple's home turf
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Apple just knows how to sell.
This I do not doubt, it's their ablity to design and make decent products that I doubt and their use of marketing to cover up for this deficiency this that I despise.
Yeah, right (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yeah, right (Score:4, Informative)
That was DEC and not HP. And DEC pretty much was destroyed by Compaq and then obliterated by HP.
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And now Carly Fiorina wants to bring that same quality of management to the US Senate. God bless America. Oh, wait, he already did!
twomanyOS (Score:2)
No big mystery here (Score:2, Insightful)
Several previously-announced tablet projects have been canceled now and the reason should be obvious. Before it's release, everyone was predicting that the iPad was going to be priced around $1000. Many companies felt that they could release a competing product that could undercut that price and started designing hardware. When it turned out that the price of the iPod was half of what it was expected to be, suddenly those $800 (or whatever) tablets became pointless. The companies had two choices: drop the p
I am betting it ships... (Score:2)
Development is likely near complete. They have been generating buzz, They have dropped several demo video and claimed it was coming later this year, it was front and center at CES. Internal Spec sheets and competitive analysis has leaked. All signs were fully on serious launch until Palm acquisition. So now what?
It is going to take time to put together a proper WebOS tablet and get in shipping condition, likely well into 2011.
It makes sense to go with the Windows Slate that many claim they want, that they h
Atom tablets are a bad idea. WebOS or Android? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless there is some ultra-low-heat version of the Atom chipset, an Atom tablet will need a cooling fan, and cooling vents. Part of the tablet will get warm and warm air will vent out one side. And this means that battery life is being wasted, converted to useless heat. Bigger, heavier, clunkier, and less battery life. Lose/lose/lose/lose. And your major advantage of the Atom is that it runs off-the-shelf Windows (or Linux) but off-the-shelf doesn't take good advantage of a touchpad; you are better off with something like Android.
I don't know if HP will put Palm's WebOS on their first tablet, or take the conservative choice and just do another Android tablet. I'm no marketing guy, but I just don't see much cachet in the WebOS; if you want to advertise lots of apps and a nice app store, Android would be the way to go. It's good for everyone (except Apple and Microsoft) if Android becomes a very standard platform with lots of units in the field to build a market segment that wants Android apps. (Right now if you are an apps developer, it's pretty much a given that you need to support iPhone... and maybe you don't even bother to support anything else! I'm hoping that the Android will become at least an equal target for apps, if not bigger than iPhone.)
On the other hand, would HP pay 1.2 billion dollars just to get Palm's expertise and staff? HP must have some sort of plans for WebOS. Which argues that they are likely to go with WebOS on their new tablets. But I don't see how they can turn that into a sales advantage. ("We have an OS nobody else has... it's exclusive!" sounds better than "You can't use the Android app store apps on this platform" but they mean the same thing.)
steveha
Apple and Palm are the only C mobiles (Score:2)
If you want to port an iPhone app to another phone, Palm is the only one who have made that possible so far. They only just got started, but nobody else has a C API ... other platforms expect you to rewrite your app in Java. So Palm OS has the best chance of being Pepsi to iPhone's Coke. Android has no chance. Not to mention less than 30% of Android runs v2. There's just no user see for developers.
Arguing over closed and open is a good way to kill time while Apple takes over the whole world. After a decade
Very mysterious (Score:2)
OK, lets say Windows 7 was tested on the device protype and it worked like crap. Wouldn't HP contact their friend, MS about it? Wouldn't they say "OK, this part of system drained battery." I believe they have access to entire Windows source, they are that big and that close to MS.
It makes no sense that HP, one of best MS friends not having a usable option for another desktop/portable OS speak like that destroying MS Windows 7 credibility. Everyone including most die hard haters keep saying Windows 7 is one
iPaq (Score:2)
I hope they release a tablet and carry on with the iPaq name.
Imagine them doing that and Apple suing them only to find out that HP has every right to use the iPaq name....and iPad might be a trademark infringement since it's a similarly named product in the same product space as HP/Compaq's original iPaq palm-computing machines (not the desktop line they were named after).
Re: (Score:2)
I pay like $30 a month for unlimited data through tmobile. You can turn off data on roam and just use wifi with a lot of devices. I mean is $30 so expensive for 3g internet everywhere? I agree it could be cheaper, but it is not wholly unreasonable, especially when you realize you can convert your phone into a portable wifi hotspot and there are no data caps on tmobile. Its not a real replacement for say something fast like cable, but it is certainly usable for web browsing. I mean what do you want? 100mpbs
Re: (Score:2)
I must clarify everywhere to be everywhere that I go. I realize that 3g doesn't work everywhere....
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It took google to make it happen, but yes, android phones are certainly taking over the ecosystem and it is fascinating. I still use windows on the desktop, because I'm not the biggest mac fan anymore, and linux really isn't a replacement with its lack of the applications I need. I think linux is starting to fill niches that need good alternatives. I think windows ce was less than ideal for a lot of people, and iphone os really showed that it was possible to have very sleek experience with cheaply available
Re: (Score:2)
Short answer?
They never intended to really release it. They just wanted to slow people from buying Apple products.