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HP Reportedly Cancels Plans for Windows 7 Tablet

Posted by Soulskill on from the changing-horses-in-the-middle-of-a-stream dept.

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."

3 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Who writes this crap? by davebarnes · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
    1. Re:Who writes this crap? by symbolset · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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

      It looks like Dell started on the right foot.

      --
      Help stamp out iliturcy.
  2. Re:Dell coming out with Android Tablets by mlingojones · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.