Or is it! Hah? Engadget is reporting on TechCrunch reporting on (and I’m reporting on Engadget, wtf, third-hand much) HP killing their HP Slate product, as demonstrated by Steve Ballmer at CES. Of course, any comment until an official announcement from HP is going to be nothing but speculation, but it’s always fun speculating.
For the record, it should be noted that HP’s official comment on the subject at the moment is ‘We don’t comment on rumors or speculation’. Fair enough.
Engadget are citing the reason for HP ‘slating’ (hahaha) the Slate being that HP aren’t ‘thrilled’ with Windows 7′s performance on the tablet.
Heres the deal though – Windows 7 runs just fine on devices of the Slate’s spec. Hardware wise, apart from the form-factor, the Slate really is nothing new – a 1.6GHz Atom processor with 1GB of RAM. And this spec runs Windows 7 just fine. Sure, it’s not blazingly fast, but it is snappy, and for netbook activities, just fine.
As a platform, it also has some great tricks (Windows 7 multitouch and gestures, incredible handwriting recognition). And six-core i7 processors suck down a fair bit of juice and aren’t really suitable for the form factor, so it’s not really a problem with the hardware / operating system.
The other thing is, the Slate’s release date would be in June. About a month. HP have poured significant time and money into the Slate project. Admittedly, for a company with resources such as HP’s, money isn’t really the object, but time is something of a more precious thing that you can’t get, no matter how much you spend. If HP were to cancel the Slate device, assuming they were interested in the tablet market, the time spent/wasted on the Slate wouldn’t be recoverable, and would delay HP’s entry to the market for quite a while.
HP’s recent purchase of Palm certainly suggests a WebOS tablet is something of an inevitability, and sure, I don’t doubt that. Thing is, it would take HP at an absolutely minimum six months to bring a WebOS tablet to market, and realistically speaking, it wouldn’t see retail within a year.
It would make far more sense to bring the Slate to market now, enter it, learn something about it, and gain some experience for when they do develop the WebOS slate. Especially when the Slate is at this point pretty much fully developed, been hyped by HP, and is so close.
I’m sure HP are slightly busy integrating Palm into their company, having a good look at the selection of patents they’ve acquired, thinking of what they can do with WebOS, and are pretty busy bunnies at HP Towers right now. The HP slate might even see a small delay as a result, but I really don’t see the product being canned.
It doesn’t make much or any sense really. I’m sure I could be wrong, anything could happen, and this is just speculation, but I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.
In Orange cinema advert style, here’s the whole thing; synopsisised;
- The HP Slate is about a month away from release
- HP have spent piles of money and time on the Slate
- It’s finished & ready to go
- Windows 7 runs just fine on 1.6GHz Atoms; HP even sell devices like this
- Windows 7 makes a suitable tablet OS due to its touchyness
- If HP do make a WebOS tablet, it will take about a year to come out. The Slate is ready to go now.
I read somewhere that it was because of the touch interface in Windows 7, not the actual core OS. And while yes, it does seem very much a rumor due to the timing, I still think it’ll be out when they say it’s out.
And I don’t think it’s going to sell very well either. But hey, that’s just my opinion, and it could end up being a runaway success, but I doubt it.
Windows 7′s touch interface continually gets slated for no apparent reason.
There’s an obvious suggestion that the operating system isn’t designed for touch, and that a 8.9″ screen will have problems with the touch inputs, but I’ve used Windows 7 on an (admittedly larger) HP Touchsmart and the experience is nothing short of awesome. It does just work.
I have also used Windows 7 on a 8.9″ 1024×600 panel, and the sizes of the onscreen elements made everything very touchable (I physically pressed the screen) – nothing was too small.
I’ll be honest, I don’t see the HP Slate going anywhere near the sales of the iPad, and I don’t see it being a massive success. I do think it will sell reasonably well, and I doubt it will be total failure either.
With engadget reporting that HP are cancelling the project due to performance problems, and you hearing that it’s due to touch problems, I have to be honest and suggest it’s nothing more than rumour milling.
[...] one of my earlier posts suggesting that HP probably weren’t killing off their Windows powered HP Slate, there’s [...]