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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."

4 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. 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.

  3. 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.)