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."

Comments

Who writes this crap?

[davebarnes]

"HP knows how to build and sell hardware, not operating systems."
MP/E and HP-UX are what? Chopped Liver?

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Reality Master 101]

HPq traditionally has had great hard ward, but absolutely atrocious software. I have no idea why they are seemingly so incompetent with software, but it's true more often than it isn't. I remember even working with their medical devices back in the 90s. Just awful software, but bulletproof hardware (I don't know what it's like these days). But yeah, there are exceptions, but This one of the reasons I was leery of the slate. It looked interesting, but my gut feeling was that HP would screw it up.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenVMS was quite popular back in the day too. I think HP knows how to sell OSes just fine. They also made some decent handhelds back in the day.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[jhoegl]

I see more buts than I did at spring break!

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Reality Master 101]

LOL...not quite awake this morning, as you can also tell by the typos.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't well-known, but HP-UX, Tru64 and MP/E run some of the most critical and important computer systems in the world.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[rolfwind]

Wow, obviously two great and consumer friendly examples.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

If only there were some company they could buy with expertise on making OSes for mobile devices...

Re:Who writes this crap?

[symbolset]

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 started on the right foot.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[ZosX]

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. Anymore these days it seems like everything is made so cheaply in china with subpar surface mounting that I really don't expect hardly anything to last more than a year or two. A far cry from the 5-10 years you could eek out of 90s gear. I went through 3 mp3 players before I realized that they are all built so cheaply that they can't take any sort of abuse at all. My last sandisk fuze lasted me about 3 months before the surface mounts failed. Sure I dropped it about 3-4 times and even knocked the metal case off the back, but that sure doesn't say a lot about a device when it can't take a couple of 3-4 foot drops. My old powershot 590IS was a lot more sturdy than that, and it was a freaking plastic camera!

Re:Who writes this crap?

[joeyblades]

Well known by what standards? They are both a little dated, but they are well known by people who know OSes...

Re:Who writes this crap?

[WrongSizeGlass]

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?"

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not well known because you don't use their high-end, mission critical, big ass systems

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

MP/E and HP-UX are what? Chopped Liver?

They are from pre-Fiorina HP, which was a vastly different company. I doubt any engineers left at HP could create the necessary OS, and even if they could, there isn't the management support to slog through and do it, and not just rush it through 80% of its life, and wind up with a piece of crap if they don't kill it first.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[kmankmankman2001]

Perhaps the OP needed greater emphasis . . . "build AND sell". There, that better? HP can build OS's (or at least buy those that do) but the SELL part, eh, not so much.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[MrCrassic]

Well, having owned their top-of-the-line "mobile workstation" (HP nw8240, administered by our school for Class of 2009) and some of their inkjet printers, I can sort of second these claims, at least for their consumer hardware.

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 operating procedure for most consumer laptops, as the hinge on my new Dell Latitude E6500 snapped off after three months and is now having intermittent trouble starting and have heard of weird problems plaguing MacBook/Pro owners.

I also remember owning a HP LaserJet 5, and that thing was dead solid. Worked forever...or at least until I tried experimenting with the toner and failed spectacularly. :-) I've also used old HP oscilloscopes for circuits lab experiments at school, and those things are tanks (and have been there for God knows how long, so they must have worked well since then). Their calculators were also great, though learning RPN to use them was not. :-)

I think the general problem is the demand for ever-decreasing prices on consumer hardware, which cheapens things all over the assembly process.

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?

[larry bagina]

HP is 2 steps removed (Compaq, DEC) from VMS.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[stox]

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

Re:Who writes this crap?

[obarthelemy]

you mean, back in the DEC then Compaq days ?

Re:Who writes this crap?

[oztiks]

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Arrington

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 :)

Re:Who writes this crap?

[obarthelemy]

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 quality to price/features/ads/design... Extended warranties are so expensive

I've ressorted to building my own desktops, and I'm having much fewer problems with them than with the usual Dell crap. Alas, mobile phones, laptops and tablets I can't build.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Kral_Blbec]

I've been using my eee t91mt netbook/tablet convertable for months and I love it. I really see no point in a true tablet when for a marginal price increase you can have the best of both worlds in a convertible. Win 7 works just find in tablet mode, but there will always be times when the keyboard is useful.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortune 50 company with lots of employees who need computers - is it possible the computers are more for buying leverage than for profitability? As the high-water-mark, I generally look at what's available at Wal-Mart. Today, it's eMachines and HP for desktops, and assorted notebooks. If Wal-Mart is the very definition of "cheap crap from China" and HP sells desktops there, what do we logically conclude? Either Wal-Mart makes and exception to its rule, or HP desktops are cheap products. Or no other maufacturer was able to meet Wal-Mart's packaging or pricing demands of course, implying... I guess I'll leave a conclusion to the reader.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Teufelsmuhle]

This article is about consumer products, and this comment clearly should be taken in that context. The typical consumer has never even heard of HP-UX or MPE, let alone possessing the requisite knowledge to judge either of the two. So in this context, yes, both are decidely "chopped liver". (It also could be argued both are "chopped liver" in any context, but that's a different discussion.)

Re:Who writes this crap?

[christurkel]

And it's not Apple OS, it's iPhone OS.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

This one of the reasons I was leery of the slate.

Atom processor...Windows 7

It was doomed from the start. This is a new era. If you're not bringing arm and from the ground up touch oriented OS's of which Win7 is not, you may as well forget it. The iPad will eat you for lunch.

Thankfully, somebody at HP figured that out before they lost a lot of money.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[jcr]

MP/E and HP-UX are what? Chopped Liver?

I have very fond memories of MPE-3. It was the first timesharing system I ever used. I can't remember ever seeing an HP3000 crash in four years of high school, usually running around 100 user sessions.

-jcr

Re:Who writes this crap?

[jcr]

When HP first started making PCs, they were a solid and reliable as HP's computers always had been. They couldn't keep that up though, because once Dell and Gateway started that race to the bottom, all the margin got squeezed out, and it simply became infeasible for a company of HP's size to stay in business making more expensive, higher-quality hardware. HP's machines ran windows, and so did the screwdriver-shop shitboxes, and their performance was comparable for the year or so they'd be in use before they failed.

The same thing happened to DEC and IBM. Rather sad, really.

-jcr

Re:Who writes this crap?

[kkwst2]

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 to understand that when they're trying to assemble a reasonably performing PC for $500 that they're going to cut some corners to save a few bucks, is it? When you build your own computer, you're usually going to choose better components than you get in a commodity Dell. They have higher quality power and capacitors, which I think is where the cheap ones usually fail.

But with a little shopping, you can find a decent quad core desktop for $500. If it's not mission critical, how can you complain too much about that? If it goes out in a couple of years, replace it with a faster crappy $500 computer. It makes more sense than paying $1000 for one that will last twice as long, unless you can't tolerate the down time.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[trapnest]

My sisters hp netbook has an Atom processor and runs windows 7 very well.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[symbolset]

Let me condition that a little bit. A year ago this thing would have rocked my world. There would have been four of them under my Christmas tree. I would have put Linux on them straight away, but I'd have bought them and stared wistfully at the Tegra2 slates, mourning my haste. But now? No.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

"HP knows how to build and sell hardware, not operating systems."

Um, maybe thats why they bought Palm? Now they have the WebOS development team.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[tomhudson]

Or maybe they realize that something like the Evo 4G is an iPhone/iPad killer.

50% bigger screen than Apple's next-gen iPhone 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 pocket or purse. The iPhone's screen is too small to really share. This is "just right". It's a tablet-killer. So maybe HP sees that the tablet market, after more than a decade of trying to take flight, is going to nosedive, and will come out with something Palm-ish in a 4.3" format?

Re:Who writes this crap?

[hairyfeet]

Actually W7 has a VERY nice touch interface, so that isn't the problem, the problem is Atom is a shitty embedded CPU and isn't really made to run a full OS. Hell working on XP based Atom machines here at the shop I was struck by how truly shitty the Atom CPU is, when my nearly decade old 1.3Ghz Celeron PC ran circles around the thing.

No, if someone wants to make a kick as touchscreen tablet with great performance and decent battery life I would suggest building it around the AMD Neo platform as it pairs an ULV Athlon based single or dual core CPU with a Radeon GPU to offload video acceleration to. I recently got to play with a Neo based netbook at the shop and frankly it is the first netbook that impressed the hell out of me. The OS, which was W7 HP, was smooth and responsive, video was great without flickering or stuttering, the unit never felt hot, it felt more like a "real" laptop in a netbook FF than one of those crippled Atom things.

If someone was to drop a Neo system into a tablet FF with a touchscreen and get it close to the Neo netbook I was playing with on price (around $400) I would snatch one up in a heartbeat. The Atom CPU is simply too underpowered, especially when using anything less than the ION GPU, to really be worthwhile in a tablet form. Hell it wouldn't even surprise me if Apple ends up going AMD since Intel has killed the Nvidia GPUs by cutting off their ability to make chipsets for the new sockets. In the ultra mobile space you really need a good GPU to have good performance while still being efficient, and the ATOM plus Intel GPU just don't cut the mustard, at least IMHO.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

um, yes?

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you trolling or do you not realize that there is a difference between a netbook running Windows 7 and a Slate that will be competitive in the modern marketplace? You aren't going to beat the iPad by taking an Eee and lopping off the keyboard. That's almost laughable. And if early sales are any indication, the iPad is going to be a juggernaut. It is defining the market. Since obviously, you don't know the difference, let me help you.

Netbook 2-3 pounds with the heavier models having the most battery life.
Slate 1.5 pounds with 10 hours of battery life.

Netbook Atom processor which consequently means heat and a fan.
Slate Arm, always cool to the touch and no whining fan noise.

Netbook Windows 7 an OS which was not designed from the ground up to work on capacitive touch. Which isn't so much an issue for the OS itself as you can always theme it or whatever. But how about the ecosystem? How many Windows programs are designed to work with capacitive touch not to mention multi-touch? There is much more to multi-touch than making a window bigger. How do you zoom in text with multi-touch without expanding the window on an application that wasn't designed for that. Clue: you don't.
Slate 50-100 thousand apps depending on the OS (iPad/Android). There are very few legitimate uses for a slate that iPad or Android doesn't have an app for. Web browsing, video, Android will have flash in a month or so so you can stream Hulu, IM, Music listening, document editing, book reading, server administration (SSH, vnc, rdesktop), picture taking, video taking (Android), games, email, gps routing, you name it, it's there. And if isn't, write it and make a fortune.

Just for the record, I despise Apple and would never buy any of their products but I'm not going to deny reality when it's staring me into the face and people like you with their heads in the sand is why MS just got caught (again) with their pants down.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[TheKidWho]

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.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Hognoxious]

If you haven't heard of HP-UX (pronounce it like you're coughing then spitting) you're a fucking grade A spaz.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Hognoxious]

HPq traditionally has had great hard ward

Is that where they treat you if you OD on viagra?

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

My Atom netbook running Windows 7 and its 9 hour battery life would like to disagree.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Flamebait? The level of denial and desperation exhibited by you MS toadies is palpable. Do you actually think that down-modding a comment on a tech forum is going to save your asses? The iPad and Android are going to rape you. MS has already lost the tablet and the pathetic HP Slate has already crashed and burned before it even got out of the gate.

It's a new era, 'Softies. Sorry about your luck.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tom Hudson, this is why you shouldn't ever go to vegas.

I find it funny that the market disagree's with you.

If you go on what the manufacture says it does, then you might as well get chinese ipods, after all, they have FM raidio's.

idiot. It's the full package. No one has come close. Lots of phone's can pinch and zoom, one does it smooth, same with home page icon scrolling, (hi droid, talking to you)

I don't get what you failures have against apple. It's still a better phone, and FEATURES WILL NEVER CHANGE THAT RETARD.

the original iphone shipped without mms, cut and paste, and a million other things that you all said would be it's downfall. It's the most popular smartphone on the planet since it came out years ago.

full of fucking fail.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Bert64]

And it wasn't owned by HP back in those days when it was quite popular...
Also their handhelds didn't run HP software...

Re:Who writes this crap?

[magnwa]

Nine hours of watching movies? Cause I'm serious, I spent around 10 hours watching netflix streaming and ripped movies on this iPad.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[jedidiah]

If you haven't heard of HP/UX then you are "merely a consumer".

Re:Who writes this crap?

[jedidiah]

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 account for much of it's usefulness.

Any competitor just needs to do the same.

The distance between Apple and their competitors is not quite as wide as the fanboys want everyone to believe.

Plus, Apples approach has it's own problems.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[ProppaT]

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.

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?

[gbjbaanb]

Over the last several years the people at Palm created good software that was delivered on marginal hardware and sold via substandard marketing. ... . 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?"

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 bureaucracy soon enough.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[zuperduperman]

>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 it seems to pause and think for a second, then it insists on zooming out to the screen of thumbnails and then it thinks for *another* second before zooming in on the new page, and *only then* does that page even start loading. For someone who's default browsing mode is to open a lot of links in new windows it's so ponderous it is totally unusable.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

the iPhone Is not the most popular smart phone anywhere you retard. Just in America where the ratio of gullible people seem to be over the 90%.

FAIL, thats what I think when I find a poor slob in the midst of an Stockholm syndrome catharsis.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[jimfrost]

So you agree, obviously. I mean, who the hell would pay for MP/E or HP-UX?

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Skuld-Chan]

"like new" HP-3000 from Prof. Frink's garage sale).

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).

Re:Who writes this crap?

[gmhowell]

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.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[mgblst]

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.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[mgblst]

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.

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.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[symbolset]

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 to say that the game was over.

Incidentally, the IBM PC was an accidental rogue engineering program that got out of control and managed to release product before Corporate understood what was happening. By the time the suits understood what was going on it was all over. There's a lesson there.

If the salesman has to resort to telling you that you won't get fired for buying his product, then he lied. You boss pays you to think about what's best for your organization, not to avoid unemployment.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

And it has an amazing 1GB storage! That's 6.25% the capacity of the smallest iPad! Oh, yeah, Apple is screwed *lololololol...

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you zoom in text with multi-touch without expanding the window on an application that wasn't designed for that. Clue: you don't.

Simple - you map the control key-scroll wheel event to the pinch event.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then how do you expand and shrink the whole window? Because people are going to want to do that too. After all, they have come to expect that out of a desktop OS like Windows. IPad and Android sidestep this issue by having all windows always be full-screen which works because that's what people expect from a pure touch screen OS.

Like most people running their dick beaters across their keyboards in this thread, you just don't get it.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[sim82]

you are right. The original author must have confused them with SUN.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[kevingolding2001]

(pronounce it like you're coughing then spitting)

That's usually how I pronounce "Windows".

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it funny that the market disagree's with you.

I wasn't aware that disagree even had a plural. Oh wait, even if it did you'd stil be a bag of cunt. Fail fail, Failetty-fail Failetty-fail - FAIL FAIL!!!

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe they realize that something like the Evo 4G is an iPhone/iPad killer.

If you want to kill the iPhone, it's no longer enough to just come out with better hardware. You have to come out with better hardware, an App Store with 100,000+ apps and a dizzying array of third-party peripherals, cases, etc all of which feature a neat little logo that states "made for iPhone." The iPhone/iPod Touch is no longer just a device--it's an entire supporting ecosystem that Apple has been cultivating for years now.

So unless Google et al can develop their own such ecosystems, nothing is going to take the iPhone down for a long time. Android has made strides on the app-store front, but I don't see a bazillion different cases/peripherals/et al with a common "made for Android" logo. Until that kind of stuff shows up, Android will never "kill" the iPhone.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[MistrBlank]

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.

     

Re:Who writes this crap?

[English French Man]

They aren't well known to the general public, but a lot of professional system's administrator knows them.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[farble1670]

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.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[BasilBrush]

8 years of people calling 100s of new devices "iPod Killers" or "iPhone Killers", and not a single one has been right. Yet here we get yet another idiot only too willing to make himself look stupid making the same dumb prediction.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[causality]

You boss pays you to think about what's best for your organization, not to avoid unemployment.

Ideally they would be one and the same.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

HAH someone beat me to the punch. HP has made huge contributions to Unix and Lunix. They have access to alot of windows source as well via NDA for driver/firmware support. These people are far more than a hardware company. This is not dell peeps ;)

Lets face it, with low margin, commodity servers, you need to expand your business. HP recently purchased EDS to grow its servicing side and now Palm for a growing tablet/netbook market. Looks like its the sign of the times.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, the Evo is too big to be a good phone, and too small to be a good tablet. Plus it runs Windows Mobile 6.5.

Re:Who writes this crap?

[tomhudson]

Retard said:

On the other hand, the Evo is too big to be a good phone, and too small to be a good tablet. Plus it runs Windows Mobile 6.5.

Yeah, right. Since when is Android 2.1 from Microsoft? And all the reviews say it's a killer.

This thing does not exist

[symbolset]

I said so then. The thing didn't do what it was intended to do: kill interest in the iPad and Android slates. The of Microsoft killing progress by announcing vaporware is over.

Re:This thing does not exist

[UnknowingFool]

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 understand it wasn't a demo. When I explained that to them, they were less excited.

Re:This thing does not exist

[Skuld-Chan]

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.

3g prices are to high for a WebOS to work Roaming

[Joe The Dragon]

3g prices are to high for a WebOS to work good and Roaming costs can be higher then what a car can cost for under 1gb of data.

Re:3g prices are to high for a WebOS to work Roami

[Anonymous Coward]

WebOs dosent mean what you think it means. Google is your friend

The real story...

[farrellj]

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

Re:The real story...

[lurch_mojoff]

Contrary to the obviously less than clued in article says, it's all Linux, be it Android, Chrome or WebOS.

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?

Re:The real story...

[Bearhouse]

...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.

Re:The real story...

[FlyingBishop]

Certainly. Especially if you want to do massive fuzz testing to look for vulnerabilities and bugs in said browser.

Re:The real story...

[farrellj]

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

Re:The real story...

[AHuxley]

Somewhere in Lindon, Utah
... The real story about HP's purchase of of Palm is that now they have access to versions of Unix
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.

Re:3g prices are to high for a WebOS to work Roami

[scld]

3G prices? I don't know what 3G prices would have to do with how well an operating system works, especially on a tablet. Also, going to your settings and setting "Data while roaming" to 'no' is a good start.

Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[N!NJA]

Dell seems to have realized http://www.androidcentral.com/dell-looking-glass-tablet-tegra-2-love a lot earlier that Windows 7 would not be responsive enough on a slow processor and made the conscious and responsible move towards an alternative OS before HP. It has taken HP months of tests to realize that an Atom CPU and Win7 aren't a match made in heaven. They even posted videos on their YouTube channel recently! HP should either upgrade the Slate's CPU and stick with Win7 -- which would give them a larger-than-life ecosystem -- or they should go with Android, which, not only is open, but it's also growing in popularity at a great pace http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-features/49518-android-market-hits-50k-app-mark/.

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[TiberiusMonkey]

I keep hearing people say that Windows 7 doesn't run well on Atom's but I have to say, Windows 7 works great on my 1005ha Eee (Aero all on, and used everyday), in fact it probably runs better than my regular UNR, and I'm no Windows fanboy.

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[sznupi]

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.

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[oakgrove]

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 it weighed 1.5 pounds? You have to put this stuff in perspective. Windows 7 may run well on your Eee in your opinion but we're discussing slates here. HP did the right thing in canceling this doomed project.

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[mlingojones]

Not sure why everyone assumes that Android is a better choice for HP than webOS. Who cares if it's "open" - HP now owns the codebase to webOS, so while there may be an advantage to going with Android over Windows 7, there isn't one to going with Android over webOS.

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[N!NJA]

the problem is that a 2-min wait for a boot and a 10-sec wait to launch a browser is not acceptable to many people that have used decent computers before. besides, Flash does not run well on Atom processors. that's a fact. and HP was already bragging about Flash support on the Slate, which, although a nice plus, would leave people with a bitter taste in their mouth when they tried fullscreen playback.

i have the excellent HP tm2 tablet with an Intel SU7300 and 4Gb of RAM running Win7. after tweaking my Services and Startup progs, it still takes it a whole minute to start the tablet and launch IE (takes longer to lauch FF with all my addons. this kind of wait isnt a big deal to me, but the people who have smartphones or have used the iPad, are expecting tablets with 2-sec boots. i would not buy an iPad for the very same reason i would not buy an Atom Slate running Win7: it would be too expensive (HP was planning a $550 price tag) for the half-baked computer experience it would provide.

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[TiberiusMonkey]

I totally agree with your overall points about Win7 on a tablet, I was focusing more on your point about Win7 not being a good match on an Atom and how I'd heard that said before and in my experience it runs very very well on my 1005 and as a big time Linux fan I was honestly surprised at how well it ran, noticeably better than UNR in areas. As I said though, I agree with your points about Win7 on a tablet.

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[mgblst]

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.

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[mjwx]

Not sure why everyone assumes that Android is a better choice for HP than webOS.

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't work with a vast majority of applications.

The Marketing didn't help either, Palm wanted an ad that few people who saw it would forget, that worked but it worked against them by turning their best audience against them. Palm's traditional audience had business people and geeks, generally intelligent and concrete thinkers. To create and use an ad that appealed to the more abstract thinkers was a massive mistake.

The hardware was less then stellar. A few user unfriendly aspects in the Pre's hardware made it less desirable, namely the fairly sharp bottom edge when the KB was open. Also the decision to go CDMA limited it's release to 1 (one) first world country during the greatest economic downturn in 80 years. The GSM version was too little too late as Android had a firm hold in Europe and was (is still) rapidly advancing.

Now, please dear fanboys, put down the torches and pitchforks. To be totally honest, whilst I prefer Android I'd rather see Web OS then Iphone or Windows OS's being adopted, Android is coming out ahead because whilst Palm was floundering with WebOS Android was making huge leaps forward and manufacturers were adopting Android because Google could be counted on. Android is ahead in technology, adoption and in the case of WebOS, marketing.

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[farble1670]

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 weighs over two pounds. that's a small price to pay for me, consider it has a 320GB hard drive, USB ports, a keyboard, SD card reader, and outputs 1920x1200 on an external monitor. you'll probably be able to have all those things w/ an ipad in the future, and it'll cost you another $600.

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[oakgrove]

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 fan, and a dedicated touch screen with applications that are all designed to work with it (not just the OS) and more or less "I don't have to worry about it" battery life. That's is not happening on a netbook with the keyboard cut off and a touch screen plastered on. You can't get that kind of battery life, and fanless running on an Atom with Win7 unless you had it clocked at something like 400 MHz. How well would your Windows run at that speed?

The point is Windows 7 and Atom are based on architectures and code from another arena of computing. That is the reason MS has utterly failed at generating any kind of real adoption of Tablet based computing on the consumer level no matter how hard they've tried. Sure, you could put a UI on Windows and make it look like anything you want and they've done a good job of making the OS itself touch friendly but, to coin a phrase, "It's the apps, stupid." How do you use multi-touch pinch font zooming on an application that isn't designed for that? Do you set the pinch zoom to expand the window or the text inside of the window? Do you map it to a keyboard shortcut? Different apps have different shortcuts. How would you zoom streets and trips as that's the main gps mapping solution for Windows AFAICT; which btw, runs like ASS on an Atom, I've tried. And just like the iPhone set the touchscreen phone standard before it, the iPad is doing it again for the slate. As of April, people now expect a slate OS to work a certain way. For example, it should always run apps at full screen since that's how the iPad does it (for very good reason, it's coming). They'll expect differently from Windows so they will be confused. And that's even if you could put it on a slate like the iPad in the first place which is fantasy.

Let me say this: I don't have an iPad, but I've used one. My gf's uncle has one and I have messed around with it quite a bit so I know what's up. I have a phone that runs Android so I'm very familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of capacitive touch. Prior to that I had 1 WinMo2003 device and 2 WinMo5 devices so I know the pitfalls of using a stylus to run a touchscreen OS. I currently have an Acer Aspire One that came with XP but is now running Ubuntu and I've played around with netbooks running both XP and 7 at various times so I pretty much know what you're working with. Ubuntu/Windows+slate=fail. Apple gets this. HP obviously figured it out. Now it's time for the fanboys^H^H^H^H people like you to figure it out too.

P.S.

consider it has a 320GB hard drive, USB ports, a keyboard, SD card reader, and outputs 1920x1200 on an external monitor. you'll probably be able to have all those things w/ an ipad in the future, and it'll cost you another $600.

Nope, it'll be running Android, ChromeOS, or WebOS and it'll cost less than $500. You'll get all of that sans the keyboard and rotating platter HDD. See, that's now the standard too. Anybody who thought the cheapest iPad was going to be 1000 dollars was kidding themselves. I knew from the minute I heard that that it was wrong and any company betting their strategy on that number was going to be in for a hell of a surprise. I could be wrong but I highly doubt there is a place for desktop Windows or Linux or anything else with a legacy of desktop oriented programs in this environment.

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[farble1670]

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.s, i couldn't be bothered to read most of your fanboi ranting, so i apologize if i didn't respond to each of your points.

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[oakgrove]

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?

Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been watching you two duke it out in this thread with a certain, er, bemused detachment for a while now and I have to say that in the fanboy race to the bottom, you have been declared the winner!

Linux fanboys are pretty bad but the "WINDOWS IS TEH BESTEST FER EVERTHANG11!!!SPITTLE!PHLEGMDROOL" fanboys like you are the worst I've seen yet. Congratulations, douchebag.

not again

[matushorvath]

If this is true, then go to hell HP. First you discontinued the TC1100, which even until today is one of the best slate tablets made, and now this. Next time you announce a tablet, you can count on me not caring.

Re:not again

[Antiocheian]

They have made the 2710p, 2730p and 2740p tablets. These are really great. I am not sure if there is any advantage to the slim keyboard, bulky monitor design but besides this difference, these are the TC1100 updated. Highly recommended. I own the 2710p and really enjoying its great ergonomics with all the tablet features.

Re:not again

[matushorvath]

Well, one disadvantage of many current tablets is their weight. I did a quick research, 2710p is not that bad (starting from 1.6kg up to 2.0kg). TC1100 without keyboard was 1.4kg and TC1000 was 1.35kg. For a computer that you are usually holding in one hand, weight is important. Even 1.35 feels on the heavy side. I read lots of books lying down and partially holding it, partially supporting it on something. I could not do that with a 2.0 kg notebook (tried it :).

Another thing, TC1000 was beautiful (ok, that is subjective :), TC4200 which replaced it was just a standard looking black notebook.

I miss my TC1000 very much, currently I am using Lenovo X61 which is very good, but I am still searching for something as perfect as TC1000 was.

Re:not again

[Antiocheian]

An important reason behind the increased weight is that the 27x0p line is built with a magnesium alloy frame. It looks great and obviously provides greater durability.

I do agree with your point about the detachable keyboard. I believe the Slate or even perhaps the WePad will fill the blank.

Not So Sure

[Voyager529]

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.

Re:Not So Sure

[magnwa]

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.

Re:Not So Sure

[OzPeter]

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

[lurch_mojoff]

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?

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.

Re:Not So Sure

[foo fighter]

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 won't have been tuned properly.

Re:Not So Sure

[Voyager529]

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 manufacturing are also huge considerations IF a Win7 tablet is also in the works. Call me nuts, but I'm fairly certain there's a market for a tablet that can say "I'm compatible with all of your USB peripherals you've already got, and all the software you've already bought". Some might look for a tablet with WebOS that's a more tablet-specific experience like the iPad, and for that WebOS is probably a better competitor, but I'd also wager that there are plenty of applications for a tablet with that in mind. Therefore, if HP intends to release both a Win7 tablet and a WebOS tablet, they're likely better off keeping the manufacturing process the same for both, sending them out the factory with the sole difference being the firmware flashed on them, and sticking them in different boxes. This also helps for warranty service where reflashing the unit with whatever the user wants is easier than having to double the warehouse inventory. If those two advantages are great enough, I'd wager that HP will likely opt to expand WebOS to work with the same hardware.

But yes, I realize that my entire point here hinges on HP releasing the Slate for both platforms. If WebOS is replacing Win7, then yeah, it still could go either way.

Re:Not So Sure

[sznupi]

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.

Re:Not So Sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, I'm not sure it can be read either way. PR would want to "manage the rumors" because that's their job -- basic turf war policy, and really, it's simple Due Diligence on HP's part to have only the PR people handle comment on anything at all.

That's the sticker about Due Diligence - it doesn't matter that the truth might have a quick sensible reply that would be helpful to HP's Slate strategy. What matters is that there's a rumour, and it's a weekend, and a response must go through approved Channels & Processes or HP will have exposed its balls to a shareholder vice that can be applied on something completely unrelated to the Slate.

Which sucks, yes. A lot of bizarre rules come about because they patch a hole that some asshole figured a way to screw the system through.

Re:Not So Sure

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what happened with netbooks. Turns out people didn't care about having dedicated UIs that were tailored for netbook screen sizes as long as it ran windows acceptably. HP is missing out on a fantastic opportunity if they ditch Windows.

You think the iPad is successful? Imagine if it ran windows, for the price of a windows tablet PC, you could buy several iPads.

And remember, an Atom CPU is not an Atom CPU, it is rumoured that HP are using the 5xx series, which are exceptionally low powered, you think your netbook has exceptional battery life now, wait until you see more that use 5xx series Atoms like the Sony Z series. An amazing little computer from sony, exceptional battery life, approx the size of a tablet, around the same target mass etc...

It is in my opinion that for something with a June launch date, that HP would have had to commit to volume orders months ago, and would need significant stock inventory on hand right now. As fast as things seem to move in the consumer segment, behind the scenes these things take months to years. It would cost a lot of money to cancel the hardware in this stage of any project.

Re:3g prices are to high for a WebOS to work Roami

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be confusing WebOS with a web-based OS. WebOS is what the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi smartphones run. It's similar to most other smartphone OSs.

The real winner is Un*x, everywhere...

[Anonymous Coward]

A few years ago the future looked bleak: a MS-dominated world with no viable alternatives.

Now companies are seeing the light: Windows is an overpriced piece of junk.

Every capable cellphone and capable tablet shall now be running one version of Un*x or another: Linux or OS X.

Go, go, go. I've been waiting 15 years for this to happen (when I first discovered Linux, in 1995, a bit late to the Un*x party). I hope this trend continues.

Go Un*x, no matter which one as long as this mediocre piece of crap only admired by paid MS astro-fanbois-turfers gets less and less influencial.

My world is now Linux, OS X and OpenBSD and my apps are GMail and Google docs. Die a slow and painful death Windows, thou shall not be missed.

Re:The real winner is Un*x, everywhere...

[ZosX]

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 hardware. Also the slow rise of ARM to prominence in a very large number of devices is very interesting as well and has given the embedded world the cpu it needs with horsepower available. Are these things going to take over the behemoth multi-core desktop CPUs? Not really. But, for a lot of people, I think they will, and that is an interesting shift in perception. I think time will tell if these sort of small, efficient internet enabled devices take off. Its certainly a new revolution and an exciting one in a world that has largely been dominated by stagnant 20 year old designs.

Re:3g prices are to high for a WebOS to work Roami

[ZosX]

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 everywhere? Its not going to happen. Not any time soon. Even cricket has 3G services (I hear they suck) that you can buy data for like $35 a month. Its not going to get much cheaper than that.

Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Re:Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years

[Anonymous Coward]

ummm.... the atom has been made increasingly power efficient. Netbooks now days are running up to 5-7 hours on a charge. Compared to the original eeePC's that is not exactly "standing still."

Re:Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years

[Anonymous Coward]

The power efficiency gains are entirely the result of improved chipsets, not improvements in the Atom processor itself. The greatest gains in power efficiency would be a result of combining the processor core and chipset onto the same die (not merely in the same package). To do this however, the Atom core would have to be synthesizable, which it is not.

Of course, battery life has also improved by putting 6-cell battery packs into netbooks. This kinda defeats the purpose of a small and light computer, but I suppose that's not necessarily too heavy for a netbook. For a tablet, however, 6-cells would probably be too heavy.

Re:Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years

[mr_matticus]

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 power consumption increased to 5.5W, so Intel still has a ton of work to do.

Re:Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years

[mgblst]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Tiger Point is a chipset; the Atom CPU has remained the same.

Which dual-core Atom draws less than any single-core Atom chip ever produced? Seriously, am I missing something? How is that even possible without a process shrink or new micro-architecture?

Re:Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years

[Rudeboy777]

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 platform as opposed to the Atom CPU itself.

Re:Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years

[steveha]

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

Re:Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years

[steveha]

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

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

Re:3g prices are to high for a WebOS to work Roami

[ZosX]

I must clarify everywhere to be everywhere that I go. I realize that 3g doesn't work everywhere....

Does that mean...

[jonnat]

... that the next time Ballmer gets up in front of an audience to tell us what the future of computing looks like we should keep watching YouTube videos on our Android phones?

Likely Success?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Likely success? Open Source != Success. Please leave your bias at the door when posting.

Apple knows how to sell computers not phones...

[at_slashdot]

"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...

Re:Apple knows how to sell computers not phones...

[Jer]

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 a new market than it was for Apple. Buying Palm probably won't help much - Palm isn't exactly the most respected name in the market either these days.

Re:Apple knows how to sell computers not phones...

[Bing Tsher E]

Yes. All Apple knows how to do is sell.

They've known more than that in the past, but they're kinda sorta a sugar water hustle outfit now.

Re:Apple knows how to sell computers not phones...

[dangitman]

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.

Re:Apple knows how to sell computers not phones...

[stephanruby]

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).

Another difference is that Apple now has a charismatic leader that every Apple employee believes in 100% (since he has not only started the company, but also resurrected it from almost certain doom). With HP, after the countless mergers and the consistent purges of R&D engineers, HP hasn't made itself any friends in the tech community and very few engineers/developers have any desire to work for HP right now (although something like 15 to 20 years ago, most engineers/developers would have been willing to work for that company for a significant pay-cut -- since the company had such a good technical reputation).

Re:Apple knows how to sell computers not phones...

[mjwx]

And Apple knows how to sell computers, not phones, or music, or books. Oh wait...

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.

Re:Apple knows how to sell computers not phones...

[MightyYar]

but they have never been really good at selling HP as a brand

No kidding... you can go to a Best Buy and buy an absolute abomination of a machine with "HP" stamped on it. You can also buy a really nice "HP"-stamped machine an the same store. I can't believe that they dilute their brand like this... at the very least, they should have a bo-bo brand name, like eMachines to sell the low-end stuff.

Yeah, right

[xPertCodert]

HP knows a lot more about operating systems than Google, for example. It still develops one of the best OS of all times, OpenVMS and not to forget about Digital/Tru64 Unix. There is enough knowledge in this company to create a very good and usable OS.

Re:Yeah, right

[ducomputergeek]

That was DEC and not HP. And DEC pretty much was destroyed by Compaq and then obliterated by HP.

Re:Yeah, right

[Anonymous Coward]

But they bought an OS.

Re:Yeah, right

[gmhowell]

And now Carly Fiorina wants to bring that same quality of management to the US Senate. God bless America. Oh, wait, he already did!

Re:Yeah, right

[Anonymous Coward]

That knowledge was let go in the WorkForce Reductions

MRBG

[MrBGsays]

If the Slate is not available in a Win7 config I won't be buying it. I don't need a trinket tablet, I need one that runs real world applications. If I want a trinket tablet I'll just get a iPad and run apps.

Re:MRBG

[mgblst]

Have fun trying to manage your desktop OS, running normal Applications, not designed for a touch screen. Moron.

Re:3g prices are to high for a WebOS to work Roami

[Daengbo]

Bravo, sir, bravo. ::slow clap::

Re:3g prices are to high for a WebOS to work Roami

[Kral_Blbec]

According to the Tmobile site, their $30 plan (which is actually a $25 plan) has a cap of 200mb. For unlimited it hikes up to $50.

twomanyOS

[h00manist]

We have so many os's and platforms and software that we keep tossing and changing to keep everything incompatible. There's tons of software for lots of os's. Stuff like wine, executor, hypervisors and emulators are perhaps where we will end up having the largest number of software titles being able to run.

Where's the money?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, HP knows how to build hardware. But that's an expensive and decreasingly profitable business. An app store ecosystem is the gift that keeps on giving; developers pay you (a little) for the privilege of uploading their wares to your store, and you skim off the top of every purchase made. The only cost being the power bill for the servers, and the credit card processing fee. No dealing with physical inventories, no FCC approvals, no tedious "work".

So it's easy to see why they might want a stab at their own environment...

Patch Tuesday

[fragMasterFlash]

Everyone hates patch Tuesday. For the target demographic of tablet devices dealing with patch after patch for the OS and plug-ins would completely ruin the experience. While the typical geek has no problem with patches, we are sadly not the target demographic for tablet devices.

No big mystery here

[gyrogeerloose]

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 price to $499, which would have meant losing money on each unit, or drop the project. The smart thing to do was obvious.

I am betting it ships...

[guidryp]

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 have generated buzz for and have put R&D money into. If they had a business case before for this device, they still have one now.

That gives them breathing room to get the WebOS slate rolling and they can ship them together and continue to assess whether both have a place in the lineup.

So IMO it will ship because the WebOS acquisition doesn't change anything in the time frame it was supposed to ship.

Re:I am betting it ships...

[Tobyb]

I have been thinking the same thing. This is from working as a manufacturing engineer for a consumer device company in the past. For HP to have hit the June ship/in store date, they would have started full production for a couple of weeks. In fact, they probably have been running manufacturing samples for a month at least. Contracts with supplies have long been done and parts arriving at the factory. A move to WebOS would be at the end of the year at the earliest, unless Palm had something in the pipeline ready to go and just didn't have the money to get it out. But a request to delay suppliers that long would incur some serious penalties. Remember, suppliers have limited floor space as well and may have turned business down for HP. The HP slate component lines are supposedly ready and staffed. Not to mention the price of tossing testers and fixtures.

Not giving it a chance would be such as ugly situation on so many fronts. Top level: Steve Ballmer demoed this thing at their biggest keynote. HP would never get another keynote mention again, ever. Manufacturing level: Contract manufacturers and suppliers are irate and will turn the screws on HP when the WebOS tablet is quoted. Unless HP thinks that releasing this product would truly poison the well for future WebOS tablets, at this late stage, I don't see how they don't release something - quietly. At least save face and tell everyone, "Oh well, we tried and it failed. Let's go in a different direction."

What the hell?

[The Hatchet]

This is the second recent tablet cancellation since the iPad came out. The iPad sucks because of the app-store and the proprietorialism (although good hardware/setup). But two tablets canceled right after the iPad comes out? It is the perfect time to jump on the market, people start using tablets and realize the millions of uses in industry, retail, warehouses, hospitals, and so on. If all those could make their own software and not have to worry about apple's control and privacy invasions then tablets would be insanely useful. And at the same time all the others are dropping like flies? There is a huge, totally ignored market here that could be filled quickly by the first tablet to use a more open platform like win7 or android variants. I honestly don't think apples price was low enough to cut other tablets out of the market, especially the industry market. And since when has apple been known for low prices? The computer I built for 1400 bucks and threw win7 on would have cost me around $35,000 had I bought it from apple (I went to their site, plugged in the specs and the closest result that met minimum). Course, black friday sales helped, but certainly not by a factor of 20. Something just seems wrong with this drop after drop of these things. Very wrong.

Re:What the hell?

[magnwa]

Short answer?

They never intended to really release it. They just wanted to slow people from buying Apple products.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what was on the apple that cost 35k? I know you didn't add memory or hard drives FROM apple because that's just stupid - since they take third party / source hard drives and memory perfectly fine.

I think you are just being sensationalistic.

Throw up real parts and builds and we will compare your $!400 to a $35,000 computer.

HP-UX did hw hot-plugging before windows and Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

HP knew how to build operating systems back in the 1980's. I'm sure some of that knowledge-base still exists within HP.

HP-UX did hardware hot-plugging. They could replace a drive or network card while the server was still on. That's an awesome OS feature.
I don't recall seeing this feature in Windows or Linux in the 1980's.

Too bad

[edelbrp]

I was really hoping the Slate would at least get a little competition with the iPad going. Competition drives innovation.

It seemed pretty obvious to me, though, that creating a neat piece of hardware is only half (maybe even less) of what's important. The OS, software, app-store, etc. really give the iPad its strengths. It's a 'closed' platform, but doing so ensures quality and battery-life (no Flash, only hardware based video decoding).

Throwing Windows 7 Home Edition onto the Slate seemed like a ridiculously lazy thing to do, and overkill. Apple's tack at treating the iPad as an information appliance and not a computer gives it focus and makes it very good for what it was intended to do.

Still, like those who love Android over the relatively simpler iPhone, I think there's a market. Trolling the forums certainly turns up a lot of users who want a touch tablet but bristle any time an iProduct or Apple is mentioned.

Atom serves it's purpose.

[pizzach]

You don't use the Pentium M based processors when you want to get better battery time with the least amount of weight. The only thing I haven't been impressed with is Flash performance, which is why I block it. I am a Gentoo EeePC with a 1.6 Ghz Intel Atom processor. (Feel free to get off my lawn ;-))

Added Margin

[__aazsst3756]

The only way to add margin is to own the OS. Otherwise it is simply who can lean out their supply chain the most in an attempt to create a hint of profit. Besides, tablet hardware is pretty simple and generic, all the magic is in the software.

Parallel development.

[symbolset]

Most of the stuff that's developed never makes it out of the labs. Far and away you don't hear about it. There were probably half a dozen variants in development and they just trotted out the one that would most reliably not crash. HP probably had two days notice to dig it out. That's why it had vanilla W7 desktop.

Whether the engineers can't get it to work, or marketing decides it would cannibalize existing products too much, or it compares unfavorably to other products in the market and so erodes brand, or an essential component vendor discontinues a chip or any of a bunch of other reasons, most of these just go away - becoming knicknacks in a cabinet - technology white elephants that nobody remembers. They actually have to do this with lots of teams in parallel because the best laid plans of mice and men aft gang agley. I don't doubt that one of those cabinets has Macbook Airs with 3G and Firewire. Once in a rare while a vendor needs a product and somebody dimly remembers that he worked on a project that had a similar and the cabinets are rummaged looking for it. Mostly though they're forgotten until one day the cabinet is cleaned out and the dusty forgotten white elephants go in the chipper and that's that. A tragedy it is for geeks like me because each of these has a market even if it's small and the defects of these white elephants are far outweighed by the unique cleverness of the engineer set involved - but it is what it is.

It's one thing for Microsoft to support getting their software running on a prototype - they're all over that. It's quite another thing for them to give up control of the desktop on a shipping product. They're just not going to do that - and apparently they're not required to. So the thing would ship with Bing search, Office Trial, IE8 with Silverlight and .NET preinstalled. Add an anti-malware suite and now we're talking about 2GB of RAM and 32GB of flash storage, which runs up the BOM to where it's not competetive against the iPad or Tegra slates and of course it would run like crap because Atom hasn't got the grunt for all that heavy lifting. We're talking 2-3 minute boots at least.

I love my Atoms

[symbolset]

Don't get me wrong - I'm not an Atom hater. I have four of the Atom boards for desktop and thin client uses with LTSP. I have two I use for servers for various things with Ubuntu and BSD. I have two more in SuperMicro rackmount cases for network IDS and various packet logging purposes. And that's not counting the appliances and thin clients I didn't build myself. One I use with a Parralax USB servo controller for robot control. The Intel Atom is a good bit of gear, and I think Intel is moving in the right direction here but they're not moving fast enough. They had an ARM architecture, XScale, but they sold it to Marvell four years ago. They still have an ARM license. They are terrified that low-watt solutions will cannibalize the market for their desktop and laptop chips I think, so they're not giving with the holistic low-watt platforms and I think that's a mistake. They're in danger of missing a turn here out of fealty to their Redmond partner. Hopefully soon they'll figure this out. Hopefully Intel's already figured this out and the current lack is just the typical development lag between vision and execution.

But as a battery powered tablet CPU with Windows 7? Not today. Between the CPU and the chipset it burns more than 10x the watts of the ARM chips and that's a non-starter. The ARM chips burn less watts than the display or the wireless. They'll play HD video for ten hours straight with a slim battery. There's a Citrix client for them, so if you need real compute from that platform it's available. They're amazing.

It didn't work

[symbolset]

Of course it exists as a prototype - Ballmer held it up at CES. There's probably four of them, or ten. It doesn't exist as a product and according to TFA it never will.

iPad sold 300,000 units in the first two days, 600,000 the first week. The thing was almost to 2,000,000 units before the 3G version was released. If you're in tech in the US you probably know someone who owns one and you probably don't know it yet but when they sit down at the conference table with it, you will. The initial US launch volumes were so high that the global and 3G launches were delayed for product. They can't make 'em fast enough. They're reselling at premium prices on Ebay to worldwide customers who can't get 'em yet.

As a vaporware prevention of iPad adoption strategy the HP W7 Atom slate was a complete and utter failure. They may as well have skipped it. Hence the abandonment of the platform. I wish I could get my hands on one of the prototypes. It would make a nice Lucid device.

Normally I agree with you

[symbolset]

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 designed clothing already, so it's out there if you look. Better eyes are currently not available at retail. The phone form factor is not big enough to share.

The tablet market is most definitely not going to nosedive. It has reached escape velocity. Apple has sold 1.3 million iPads. That would be a large multiplier of all the other tablet solutions, ever - and that's millions of people who have barely started showing off their neat gear to other people who are going to buy them. We haven't had time yet for a commercial purchase order to clear, so there have been no enterprise deployments yet and there definitely will be. IT geeks love this thing because it's optimal for always-on acess to their servers. They can travel now. Sales pros? They'll fall in love with it too because all the docs, stats and vendor collateral fit on the local storage so if there are questions at the table they don't have to waffle - they can provide proof from the vendor, case studies and slideshows. Once the medical field gets hold of this that's another million units at least, for example. And then there's schools. Schools like Apple and this product is right up their alley. Those numbers are ridiculous, so I won't state them here but they're huge. Somehow Apple has managed to be first mover in a ten year old market (tablet PC) - that's brilliant.

You have no idea. I don't even like Apple platforms because they're too restrictive for me; they have too much DRM. I like to own my equipment utterly rather than be dependant upon the continued benevolence of some vendor. I would prefer for myself an Android slate on a Tegra 2 or better processor and some good video chipset. But I know hot when I see it and this is it.

Re:Normally I agree with you

[Joe Tie.]

IT geeks love this thing because it's optimal for always-on acess to their servers. They can travel now.

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.

Coming from me this is going to be a little rich

[symbolset]

But you don't need to be a prick. She's sincere, she just doesn't see it yet. Give her a break, and try to master the art of persuasive selling.

Atom tablets are a bad idea. WebOS or Android?

[steveha]

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

Try it

[symbolset]

You'll like it.

Apple and Palm are the only C mobiles

[gig]

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 of XP malware, iPhone OS is bug-free for 3 years and that has spoiled corporate for the unprofessional bullshit the PC industry passes off as product. If you aren't malware-free (and Android has malware not to mention no encryption, remote wipe, and other problems) then you have no fucking hope. The world has changed.

Laughing at HP for buying Palm is asinine. The whole PC market has been pushed down to low-end crap. A smartphone or iPad sells for more than a PC. Putting Palm OS on a tablet enables HP to sell it for more than a Windows tablet, and to sell much more of them.

Re:Apple and Palm are the only C mobiles

[Anonymous Coward]

Gameloft has been porting their iPhone games to WebOS in a matter of days, sometimes hours. So imagine a tablet, with true multitasking, running your favorite iPhone games. It could be very appealing.

As far as Android goes, sure, there will be a giant market for Android tablets, but then you are in a race with hardware, going against dozens of companies. Apple owns their ecosystem, and now so does HP.

Very mysterious

[Ilgaz]

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 of the best performing Windows operating systems and it is what Vista should have been. Now HP, high level executive comes up (or leaks) Windows 7 is in fact slow and it is unusable on a tablet form. After all those billions spent by MS for "tablet" stuff, the stuff they care so much that they install without asking you.

Mysterious really. I mean, MS will sure make HP pay for such PR disaster. If this is really for gaining ground to Palm WebOS running HP tablet, I am absolutely amazed at the stupidity.

iPaq

[AVryhof]

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).

Big talk from the 'pseudo expert' with no degrees

[Anonymous Coward]

tomhudson, do you even have a CSC or CIS degree, or are you a certified EE? If not, what exactly qualifies you as an expert on anything in the realm of the computer sciences? Nothing we all can see in the way of well noted accomplishments in respected publications even on your part in addition to you obviously lacking degrees in the sciences noted above, or that you can prove to your personal credit. tomhudson = just another /. wannabe.

Re:Big talk from the 'pseudo expert' with no degre

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look, it's the troll that's been stalking Clone53421, Squiggleslash, and now Tom.

For those new to this, the troll is someone claiming to be a defender of a certain Alexander Peter Kowalski, the author of a tool, apkapp2backgrounddaemonprocessengine, generally considered malware by a large number of anti-malware companies and organizations.

CA
PestPatrol
SpywareDB ("Dangerous!")
Freedom Anti-Spyware
Spycheck (Spanish-language) - "Recomendacion: DESACTIVAR Y ELIMINAR"
Spyware No-More ("Threat risk: High risk", "Advice: Remove This is a very high risk threat and should be removed immediately as to prevent harm to your computer and / or to protect your privacy")

Mr Kowalski, or his admirer, got upset because someone had the audacity to link to a threat describing Kowalski's attempts to remove some embarrassing comments posted under his name. Rather than deal with it maturely, this person has been attempting to stalk said poster and those who pointed out Kowalski wasn't doing himself any favors.

So if you see these comments posted as replies to clone, squiggleslash, or Tom, now you know why they're appearing. And if you feel like joining in, well, come on in, the water's lovely!