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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."
"HP knows how to build and sell hardware, not operating systems."
MP/E and HP-UX are what? Chopped Liver?
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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.
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.
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.
This ain't rocket surgery.
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.
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely