Tag Archives | HP

HP Slate: So Long Windows 7, Hiya WebOS?

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 12, 2010 at 12:55 pm

I started out thinking that the rumor that HP was canceling its much-hyped Windows 7 “Slate PC” strained credulity. But it’s been a couple of weeks since the idea surfaced, and HP isn’t denying it. Which isn’t a good sign–if everything was fine, wouldn’t the company say so?

Now GottaBeMobile is reporting that an allegedly excellent source says that HP is ditching Windows 7 and replacing it with the operating system it just bought: Palm’s WebOS, on a slate code-named “Hurricane.” You’d think it would take awhile to reengineer WebOS to work well on a larger device, making a release in the next few months unlikely–or has Palm been secretly tackling that challenge all along?

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Charlie Stross's Grand Unified Theory of Everything

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 30, 2010 at 12:44 pm

This has been an unusually eventful week in the tech world. Let’s see, we’ve had…

Steve Jobs’ thoughts on Flash

HP’s Palm acquistion

HP’s rumored termination of its Windows 7 slate

Microsoft’s confirmed termination of its Courtier concept tablet

The Gizmodo and Apple saga

Apple’s announcement of its WWDC event (and specifically the lack of awards for Mac apps)

Blogger Charlie Stross does a remarkable job of tying everything together in this post–which says that Jobs’ aversion to Flash is really about Apple, and the rest of the computer industry, facing a life-or-death struggle over the next few years as PCs get even more commoditized and even more of our digital lives move online. Apple, Stross says, is trying to reinvent itself from a manufacturer of Macs into a gatekeeper and provider of services, and it’s trying to do it while it still has time.

One striking, subtle point about Jobs’s memo: He says “Flash was created during the PC era…” In other words, he’s saying we’re no longer in the PC era. Stross says that “the PC revolution is almost coming to an end,” which seems like as good a way to describe where we are as any.

You can quibble with bits and pieces of Stross’s overarching analysis–or the whole damn thing if you want–but it’s incredibly thought provoking. Having grown up in Boston in the 1980s, where Route 128 was lined with wildly successful minicomputer companies which no longer exist, I’m certainly not discounting the possibility that PCs will cease to exist sooner than we expect, and that none of the huge companies that make them is guaranteed an afterlife.

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Is HP's Slate Dead?

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 30, 2010 at 12:03 am

This is one for the “I Find This Rumor Extremely Hard to Believe” file: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is reporting that a source has told him that HP has decided to cancel its “slate PC.” You know–the one that was the centerpiece of Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote and which HP was trumpeting as recently as three weeks ago.

It’s not implausible because deciding not to pursue the project is itself inexplicable. Arrington says that HP is killing the slate because it’s unhappy with Windows 7 as a tablet operating system. But it was obvious from the get-go that Win 7 as it stands really doesn’t make much sense for a slate–all the extra touch capability that Microsoft baked in still leaves Windows as a keyboard-and-mouse-centric OS with, um, a touch of touch. And there’s been no evidence to date that Microsoft is interested in doing the necessary work to make Windows a good touch-centric product. There’s no way that a Microsoft slate could have compete with Apple’s iPad unless someone put an immense amount of work into the user interface.

Back at CES, Steve Ballmer didn’t seem that interested in Windows on slate devices. The Windows product manager I talked to at the show didn’t seem that interested. I haven’t noticed a clamor among consumers for Windows slates. Really, most of the enthusiasm so far seems to have come from HP, whose seems to have found reasonable success with its TouchSmart machines. Could it have been so giddy over the idea that it had to build one before it figured out that the idea didn’t make a lot of sense?

And with other news today including the official termination of Microsoft’s “Courier” project, just where does would the cancellation of the HP slate leave Windows when it comes to untraditional PCs?

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HP Buys Palm: The Optimist's View

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 28, 2010 at 1:48 pm

Wow. The rumormongering about Palm ends today: HP is buying the struggling mobile pioneer for $1.2 billion. One of the largest tech companies on the planet will own WebOS, one of the best available mobile operating systems–but one which has failed so far to make much of an impact as it’s shipped on Palm’s Pre and Pixi handsets. It qualifies as a shocker given that most of the scuttlebutt about possible purchasers involved Asian manufacturers such as Lenovo and HTC.

When a huge old-school company buys a scrappy (relatively) little one, my instinct is always to be worried. There are far more examples of such mergers failing than there are of ones that have thrived. And there aren’t many examples of companies in distressed condition getting turned around big time.

But let’s play optimist for a moment…

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HP Teases Us With Its Slate Again

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 5, 2010 at 11:10 am

Today’s the first weekday of the post-iPad era, and HP is once again talking up its upcoming Windows 7-based slate computer. Here’s a video it released:

Looks slick–but it’s a lot easier to make a gizmo look slick in a promotional video than in real life, of course. (If only every car looked as good in a driveway as it does in TV commercials.)

The big question about the HP device is how much effort the company has put into putting a slate-oriented interface on top of Windows 7. As of the last time I asked Microsoft, it said it didn’t have plans to release a version of Windows 7 tailored especially for tablets. So it’s up to HP to make its device truly finger-friendly. With its TouchSmart PCs, the company has done a much better job than anyone else of figuring out how to integrate touch into the Windows experience. But as the iPad shows, tablets work best if their interface was designed for touch from the ground up, rather than being a desktop interface that’s been rejiggered for touch. And the iPad sets the bar very, very high.

 

 

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HP Does Android, Experimentally

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 7, 2010 at 2:31 am

Spotted Wednesday evening at Digital Experience, an unofficial press event here in Las Vegas during CES week: an HP netbook with Google’s Android OS, a touchscreen, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It bears a familial resemblance to HP’s Mini netbooks, but has been rethought in multiple ways–for instance, it lacks the row of function keys that’s standard equipment on all Windows PCs and Macs.

This machine’s presence at the show isn’t nearly the big deal it might be, for one simple reason: HP says it’s just experimenting with Android. This is a concept PC, and there’s no news about its chances of turning into a shipping product you can buy. Still, you gotta figure that if HP has gone through the bother of building this prototype, there’s a real chance it’ll commercialize it in 2010. Unless, that is, it decides to scrap the Android OS and begin over again with Google’s Chrome OS…

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Steve Ballmer to Demo Slate! Or Not!

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 6, 2010 at 11:57 am

When the New York Times’ Ashlee Vance blogged that Steve Ballmer would demo a “novel” HP slate computer at his CES keynote tonight, people got worked up and wondered if it was the semi-mythical Courier prototype. Now sentiment seems to be running against the theory that Ballmer will show off anything extraordinary. ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley thinks it might be a relatively prosaic new HP Windows 7 touch-enabled machine. Kara Swisher also says it isn’t Courier.

Sounds reasonable to me–Courier feels like something that’s most likely not ready to be a product just yet.

It’s amazing how quickly the tech world has stopped calling tablets tablets and begun referring to them as slates–a term that wasn’t bandied about much until rumors broke that Apple’s device might be named iSlate. Or can anyone explain to me what the difference is between a tablet and a slate?

Either way, I plan to be at the Ballmer keynote tonight. I’ll let you know what we see, or don’t see…

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HP: Touch, Touch, and More Touch

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 13, 2009 at 3:20 am

HP LogoA month ago, HP unveiled a bunch of new Windows 7 PCs, but ones with touchscreens were conspicuous by their absence–and given that HP has been selling TouchSmart models for close to three years now, it would have been startling if it didn’t continue to do so once the touch-enabled Windows 7 debuted.

Tonight, the company announced a second round of Windows 7 machines, including multiple multi-touch TouchSmarts. The new all-in-one touch PCs include the 20″ TouchSmart 300, starting at $899, and the 23″ TouchSmart 600, starting at $1049; the company is also introducing a refreshed version of the TouchSmart tx2, a $799 laptop with a flip-around 12.1″ screen. Those systems are all aimed at consumers, but HP is also going after businesses with the TouchSmart 9100, an all-in-one that starts at $1299 and is meant for applications such as kiosks in public places. It’s even launching the HP LD4200tm, a $2799 touch-screen LCD TV meant for use as digital signage.

TouchSmart PC

I reviewed a nicely loaded $1600 configuration of the TouchSmart 600 for PC World— it runs Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and has a Core 2 Duo CPU, Blu-Ray, a TV tuner with remote control, a 750GB hard drive, and a lot of other features–basically, it would be a very nice all-in-one PC whether or not it had a touch interface.

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HP’s DreamScreens: Photo Frames on Steroids

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 16, 2009 at 9:45 pm

HP LogoA couple of days ago, HP unveiled an array of new PCs. Now it’s announcing a couple of gadgets that aren’t PCs at all–or quite like anything else on the market. It’s calling them DreamScreens. And while I don’t think HP thinks of them this way, they strike me as upscale, next-generation photo frames that do a lot more than display photos.

The DreamScreen 100 (with a 10.2″ display) and DreamScreen 130 (with a 13.3″ one) are designed to sit on a table like a photo frame. Both have direct wireless connections to the Internet, and can display photos shared on the Web (on HP’s Snapfish site), stream music (from Pandora and a service called HP SmartRadio), and show Facebook updates and weather reports. They can also grab music and video from their own 2gB of flash storage, from thumb drives and memory cards, and from PCs on your home network.

All of this reminds me a little of the weird and wonderful Chumby, but Chumby is a platform that third-party developers can write apps for. For now, DreamScreens only run the software that HP supplies for them–but when the company showed me DreamScreens recently, a representative told me that it might allow them to use additional apps in the future.

The DreamScreens are meant for fairly passive consumption of content; you control them with an infrared remote and with capacitive buttons that only light up when you need them, so the gadgets maintain a clean, streamlined look. (Looking at their slick on-screen interfaces, I’ll bet I’m not the only person who silently thought “Gee, it would be cool if these had touch screens.”)

The DreamScreen 100 is $249 and is available now; the 130 is $299 and will be available later in the Fall. We’ll have a review up soon. See photo below; gallery of more images here.

Are you at least provisionally intrigued by the idea?
DreamScreen

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