Looks like there’s plenty going on lately at Hewlett Packard; with the spotlights being on Palm and the HP Slate. HP has recently mentioned that the HP Slate (which runs Windows 7) will not be targeting the mass market but more on the corporate/enterprise sector instead. Essentially, you could say the HP Slate is going to be aimed at companies wanting a “super-lite” keyboard-less, Intel Atom-ized version of the pricey Elitebook 2740p. But then what of regular consumers? Is HP gonna just let them run off to Apple stores to buy iPads?
Well, that’s the thing. HP has been strangely quiet about their consumer version of the Slate, which will likely be a Palm WebOS powered tablet. So far, the only hints they’ve dropped are the trademark application for the PalmPad name (though I won’t be surprised if they went for “PalmSlate” next) and to a lesser extent, talking about WebOS 2.0 being on track for an end-of-the-year (presumably before the holidays, if HP wants to capitalize on Black Friday and Christmas sales).
As if the iPad name wasn’t/isn’t bad enough (remember the jokes about the name when Apple first announced the iPad?), now it seems everyone’s following the suit! Today, Lenovo unveiled their plans to release their Android-running LePad tablet by the end of this year (the name LePad is probably “Lenovo Pad” for short, but could easily be mistaken and confused for something else by the French, due to its French-sounding name). Anyway, there could be no better a time for such news from Lenovo to break – coming less than 24 hours after it was discovered HP filed for a trademark for the name PalmPad.
And on we go to the name “Palm Pad”, which we can say with almost 100% certainty will be a tablet form-factor device running WebOS (and most likely an HP-tweaked and HP-design-sprinkled version of WebOS). The question is when? And will the Palm Pad take the place of the planned Windows-running HP Slate as a direct competitor to Apple’s iPad? No details there either, but I have a good feeling that the answer for the latter question will be YES, since Windows 7 can be a potentially clunky OS on a low-powered, slim tablet device and everyone’s been screaming for a WebOS so much, that I’m pretty sure someone at HP would have taken note.
Hey, did you hear? It’s true! Now you can stop dreaming and really have your WebOS slate/tablet in the “near future”, thanks to confirmation directly from HP via a press release reporting their Q2 2010 financial results and also their Twitter feed (they have a habit of placing the most exciting things in the oddest of places, don’t they? Like listing new processors in service manuals). HP has also mentioned that we should also expect WebOS (or some sort of variation/edition) to make its way into printers (huh?!) as well – I presume these will be all-in-one printers as well as high end business printers where using a dedicated OS would come in handy the most.
Strange enough, they haven’t mentioned anything about stuffing WebOS into digital picture frames yet… I was kinda expecting that one.
