Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest PC manufacturer, plans to do just as well in the tablet market as it is doing in the overall PC market. In fact, the company plans to do even better.
"In the PC world, with fewer ways of differentiating HP's products from our competitors, we became number one; in the tablet world we’re going to become better than number one," HP's European head Eric Cador said at a press conference in Cannes, according to The Telegraph. "We call it number one plus."
HP is likely talking long-term as its current tablet offerings are next to none. Its upcoming webOS tablet looks solid (more information below), but it's nowhere near enough for the company to take gold, or even place in the top three.
HP completed its acquisition of Palm for $1.2 billion in July 2010. Despite suspicions by many that the company would kill webOS, so far it has done the exact opposite. In October 2010, HP officially introduced webOS 2.0, the most significant update to the platform since its launch in 2009, along with the Palm Pre 2, the first device to sport it.
Two months ago, HP announced that it plans to put webOS on all of its PCs in 2012. A beta (running in a browser on Windows) is slated for this year.
HP's webOS strategy appears to be centered on leveraging its PC business to push webOS in mobile: both on smartphones and especially on tablets. It is way too soon to tell if this will work, but if webOS is going to succeed, another mobile OS will likely end up dying a slow death.
The HP TouchPad is a 9.7-inch slate (1024 x 768 resolution), powered by a dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060 processor, 16GB or 32GB of built-in storage, 1GB of RAM, HP's Beats audio, a micro-USB 2.0 port, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, a front-mounted 1.3MP camera, as well as a light sensor, gyroscope, accelerometer, compass, and GPS (3G model only). It measures 242 x 190 x 13.7mm and weighs around 740g. The device is running a WebOS 3.0 with true multitasking, Flash 10.1, a paneled e-mail application, a pop-up notification system like Growl, Skype support, wireless printing, calendar and e-mail integration via HP Synergy, as well as compatibility with Amazon's Kindle ebook store, Google Docs, QuickOffice, and more.
We've known for a while now that the HP TouchPad will arrive in June 2011. That being said, it's still not clear when exactly next month we'll be able to grab one, but we'll probably find out soon enough. Pricing should be $500 for the 16GB model and $600 for the 32GB model.
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