Harry McCracken of the Technologizer was recently at the Big Money Untethered conference yesterday where HP CEO Phil McKinney was talking about the pros and cons of using existing operating systems on new types of devices.
This is very ironic because HP at the beginning of the year touted their HP slate running Windows 7, which now looks to be dead in the water, and the future of the HP Hurricane Tablet running WebOS is very unclear. It is also ironic that CEO Phil McKinney actually appeared in an expo earlier this year debuting the Windows 7 Slate, and they made various teaser videos promoting it. When pressed for more information during the Q and A with the CEO he said he could not talk about unreleased products.
If the HP CEO is not talking about any details about their Windows 7 Slate PC at this point in the game, it looks to be dead in the water. HP did not show off any Slate or Tablet PC’s at Computex earlier this month, where everybody and their mother showed off many new devices.
HP has been very quiet about talking about new devices since the acquisition of Palm and their WEBOS in May, because the buying of the company is not official yet, HP is having a hard time saying anything concrete. The current industry speculation is that at the end of July the deal should be done and signed off by all the lawyers involved. It is hopefully at this time that HP will be more fourth coming about their Timeline for Slate PCS to debut this year or next year.
HP is missing the boat big time, along with Microsoft in capitalizing on the free for all on the Slate PC market! Microsoft although scraped their much anticipated Courier device, there are a few devices still running Windows CE 6 and Windows 7, and perhaps the tablets of tomorrow will use Microsoft’s Windows Embedded OS.
Meanwhile, most major computing companies such as Adobe, Nvidia, Dell, Acer and RIM are all working on devices to be on the market by the end of the year.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
