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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."

11 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?

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    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.

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    2. Re:Who writes this crap? by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

      Both are very well established and stable OS's (I've worked with both), but they aren't "consumer" products (unless you happened to buy the "like new" HP-3000 from Prof. Frink's garage sale).

      Over the last several years the people at Palm created good software that was delivered on marginal hardware and sold via substandard marketing. HP has the hardware & manufacturing and marketing know-how to re-establish Palm's software lines. The real question is going to be "can HP bring the Palm name and/or technology back to the marketplace in time to be successful?"

  2. The real story... by farrellj · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The real story about HP's purchase of of Palm is that now they have access to versions of Linux that run on everything from their SuperDome Supercomputer all the way down to cell phones. It's been the dream of HP for a long time to have one operating system that runs across the whole range of hardware that HP sells.

    So I can see they would cancel the Windows 7 based Slate, and will probably replace it with a WebOS based Slate. Contrary to the obviously less than clued in article says, it's all Linux, be it Android, Chrome or WebOS.

    ttyl
              Farrell

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  3. Dell coming out with Android Tablets by N!NJA · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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/.

    1. 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.

  4. Not So Sure by Voyager529 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I asked someone at HP about this on Friday, and this was her answer...

    Heads up on your Slate post to me this morning. I had to delete it! I flagged the rumor to our team and they asked me not to comment on it at all. Not that I said anything either way about the status of the slate, personally I thought it was laughable, but they said they wanted to manage the rumors and not want anyone to address it. I should hear something back soon and when I do, I'll share it.

    If the PR team is planning to "manage the rumors", I'm hesitant to believe that the rumor is accurate. After all, if HP was really killing the Slate, why wouldn't they want word out as soon as possible, or why would they care about managing what's said?

    One of the other rumors going around is that they're ditching Win7 for WebOS on the tablet, but the hardware will stay mostly the same. That's possible, but I'm wondering what the benefit would be to them if they already had a Slate ready to go with Win7, but opting to ditch it just because of the software. Personally, I've been hoping for a Win7 tablet for some time now, and there's been plenty of other positive feedback from the idea on HP's Facebook page. I'd rather see them put two SKUs out whereby the software was basically the only difference. The WebOS one would be cheaper and likely have better battery life, but the Win7 version could run desktop apps. It'd be trivial to do, but I guess we'll have to wait for the official word.

    1. Re:Not So Sure by lurch_mojoff · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  5. Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    FTA: "HP may also be abandoning Intel-based hardware for its slate lineup simply because it’s too power hungry. That would also rule out Windows 7 as an operating system." The Intel Atom has barely improved over the past two years. For the first year, it was paired up obsolete chipsets (945G, 945GSE), and only recently has Intel improved on that with Tiger Point. Still, the core has not changed (at least, I'm not aware of any announced changes), it's still manufactured at 45nm. When Intel announced their push to 32nm, many people speculated that the Atom would be the first to be manufactured because of it's simplicity. I guess it just wasn't profitable enough: Atom won't go 32nm until the second half of 2011 as Cedar Trail. The upcoming dual-core (dual die?) Atom netbook processor (N455) expected this summer will help, but it's probably too little, too late.

    ARM and their partners, on the other hand, are barreling ahead. Single core Cortex A8 designs nearly reach performance parity with the Atom at about 1/4th the energy consumption, and dual-core A9 designs are being demonstrated now. (Nvidia's Tegra 2 comes to mind.)

    1. Re:Intel Atom has Barely Improved in 2 Years by steveha · · Score: 3, Informative

      Intel doesn't really want the Atom to improve. They don't want to give up any of the Atom sales to AMD, but what they really want is for everyone to buy more-expensive and more-upscale Intel CPUs such as Core Duo or i5.

      Their problem is the Tegra 2. This is an 8-core chip that draws tiny amounts of power and yet is overall more powerful than the Atom. For half a Watt or less, you get an ARM 7 core (probably for "housekeeping"), two ARM 9 cores clocked at 1 GHz (with out-of-order execution and dual issue) for data processing, audio and graphics accelerator cores, video encode and decode cores, and an image processing core that can support a camera. This thing can decode HD movies in real time without even using the ARM 9 cores for anything!

      The Apple iPad uses the Apple A4 chip, which is believed to be basically an ARM 8 core at 1 GHz. ARM 8 means no out-of-order or dual issue. So the iPad has a single 1 GHz core and a graphics accelerator, and it can already give a pretty good user experience; just think what people can do if they get multiple cores all working at once with the Tegra 2.

      The Tegra 2 plus Android (and plus a Pixel Qi screen) is the combination to watch. Microsoft can't be happy; they want everyone to license the mobile Windows stack, but Android is both compelling and free, so that will be hard to compete with.

      Intel can't be happy, because they have no way to keep the Tegra 2 from eating into the Atom market share. "Smartbook" computers and tablets will be better with a Tegra 2 because they will dissipate less heat (no need for a cooling fan) and use less battery life while getting more work done than is possible with an Atom. It's win/win/win, but you can't get it with Windows 7, you need mobile Windows or Linux, and it's going to be Linux (Android).

      If Intel made a dual-core Atom on the 32 nanometer process, with an appropriately low-power chipset, not only would it go into netbooks but companies would start making desktop computers out of it. Why not? Get an "Energy Star" logo in the USA and sell them as "green" corporate computers or thin clients. Performance wouldn't be quite as good as a Core 2 Duo, but more than good enough, and Intel would be making less money because the margins are thinner on the Atom. Intel won't want that... (Remember Intel putting limits on how good a netbook can be? Screen can't be too big or touchscreen, can't have too much RAM, etc. Intel is trying to protect the market position of their mobile processors above the Atom.)

      steveha

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  6. Re:Yeah, right by ducomputergeek · · Score: 3, Informative

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

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