Journal symbolset's Journal: HP Slate lives? 1
eWeek is reporting that HP's Windows 7 based tablet PC, demonstrated by Steve Ballmer at CES is, contrary to previous reports, alive but delayed to October. Other reports say that it will have WebOS from HP's recent Palm acquisition. Over on CNET, Erica Ogg isn't calling it either way.
HP's own site still has promo up. Certainly they are pushing Philip McKinney as a personality with vision.
So... An HP tablet is coming in October. Will it have W7? Maybe. Will it have WebOS? Maybe. Will you be able to choose from these? It seems unlikely given the history. Compaq showed a Windows tablet at Comdex in 2001. Nothing came of it, nor did anything come of the Compaq/HP tablets that followed. All of those came with Windows.
If it arrives, it's late. By then there will be 9 million iPads in the market, and dozens of Android on ARM alternatives to compare it to. Will it be a compelling product? We'll see. HP definitely has the manufacturing chops to pump out a bunch of these. They have first rate engineers. But will their partnership commitments result in a compromise product that's lackluster in performance, has an interface that's not suitable for the form factor, requires the requisite and power-sucking Windows antimalware suite? It's possible, especially if HP gets a really sweet W7/Server 2008 licensing deal in return. Microsoft can be really persuasive, and they have a large number of "special relationships" available to sweeten a deal. Whether they can sweeten a deal to be worth more than the $1B HP paid for Palm remains to be seen. To me it would be a shame if the net result of HP buying Palm was to kill WebOS in order to get a better deal on Windows. Palm was better than that even though they made some business missteps recently and found themselves cash poor at an unfortunate moment.
Clearly there are some CEO level executive negotiations going on between Microsoft and HP. Hopefully these will become open on Groklaw one day. For now we have to wait and see if HP is ready to compete in the new world. My guess: if they come out with a W7 only tablet it will suffer the same fate as all their other Windows tablets - unit sales that peak in the tens of thousands. If they give us a choice between Android, WebOS and W7, they've got a chance of making something that catches the wave - a chance to be a part of the new people-centric consumer electronics world. If they fail it, well, there's always all those other vendors who are willing to give us what we want.
We shall see.
Whatever the outcome (Score:2)
I'll end up installing Linux on the thing, so it's always great news if a manufacturer develops an even more powerful hardware solution.