Monday, August 22, 2011

Death of the HP Tablet

"As I write this, I’m sitting in a cafe. Around me, there are five people on laptops — four of them are MacBooks. Four other people are using tablets — all four are iPads. Welcome to the Post-PC world."*1

Yeah, that pretty well sums it up. HP announced last week that it is discontinuing its tablet division and webOS products, and is trying to spin off the PC division. The part of this that rather surprised people is that this comes only a couple of months after buying the Palm brand and webOS, in order to try to really compete in the tablet world. They launched commercials with celebrities (that chick from GLEE and Russell Brand are the ones that I remember right off the top of my head.) But apparently that did not compensate for the fact that the OS, while smokin fast on other hardware, was bogged down and slow on the HP tablet hardware. And while their PC sales are good, they still are being eclipsed by Apple's MacBook sales. In my own house even, with two computer industry professionals, the numbers are three Apple devices, one PC, and an ancient dinosaur of a desktop that I *think* is running a version of Linux. I personally only know of one person who has a non-Apple tablet, and that was bought after this announcement, when the price dropped. Was HP merely getting out early in this situation, reading the writing on the wall, or is it jumping ship that could be fixed? Time will tell.

In the meantime, here's what other people are saying about it:


*1http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/18/apple-wins-without-throwing-a-punch/

http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/18/okay-hp-lets-make-some-lemonade/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/08/19/hp-down-20-now-officially-hated-by-almost-everyone/

http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/rumors-of-webos-death-are-greatly-exaggerated-20110819/

1 comment:

  1. More information about HP's recent direction change. The death of the HP Tablet supposedly is a metamorphosis into PSG's main focus...

    http://h30458.www3.hp.com/us/us/ent/1109442.html?jumpid=em_taw_US_sep11_across-xbu_1387318_hpgl_us_1109442_4&DIMID=1029648548&DICID=taw_sep11&mrm=1-4BVUP

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