HP TouchPad Warning

Still sort of shocking. I have a blackberry PlayBook (RIM) - and the TouchPad just came out in June. They werent exactly selling like hotcakes, but WebOS had some devotees. (the former Palm peeps).

Bye HP/Palm PRE, etc.

I came close to buying one but decided on the Toshiba Thrive. Had doubt about the HP competing.

The main reason for reducing prices is to reduce inventory.

In a dramatic reshuffling, Hewlett-Packard Co. said Thursday that it will discontinue its tablet computer and smartphone products and may sell or spin off its PC division, bowing out of the consumer businesses.

Full story at:

http://money.ca.msn.com/investing/news/business-news/hp-to-e...

HP is trying to get out of PC market too. The Consumer PC market is shrinking and HP is out of ideas in this space!

HP is also dumping their smartphone business. With all the competition, I'm surprised that anyone can make money making smartphones. I think only the carriers are making money.

According to the articles I've read, HP is also considering creating a separate division for their PC business. Wonder what will happen to their printer business...

Guess they can survive on the money they make on ink cartridges - call it Ink Come.

I suppose they can also survive on the paper money?

My experience was that (in some cases) HP PC's contained parts that could only be replaced with H-P components which goes against the open architecture concept that IBM had decided on in the early PC days.

They all have proprietary parts now. Need a new power supply for a Dell? After talking to India for 30 minutes, you have to order a specific one for that model. Can't get it anywhere else, so you're stuck paying their price. Usually, they just swap out some power leads, but you need to know which ones...

I looked at the HP PC's as well as others and then decided to build my own. I used components that had great reviews from other purchasers. I am very happy with the result.

These days it is hard to predict how products (including GPS, etc.) will perform over time. Also, how good the support will be when needed.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/18/technology/hp_pc_spinoff/ind...

This is a really surprising development with HP. HP has always been a hardware company. They started out building and sell the best electronic test equipment in the world. They almost single handedly created the IBM compatible market. Now they have decided to drop their bread and butter products and compete with Microsoft in the business world? I think this decision, if it stands, will spell the end of HP.

I bought an Apple iPod just this week to replace an old Palm T3. This iPod does everything my old Palm did and more in a smaller package and with better battery life. HP has a monumental task competing with Apple but you don't win by surrendering.

It didn't take long for HP to start dumping stock. They are going on sale for $99.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/19/let-the-liquidation-begin...

It is not really surprising to those of us that have been designing/implementing networks for many years. HP started out as a premiere hardware company, and for many years built the most durable and reliable servers in existence. They also built industrial strength workgroup printers that were nearly indestructible. I still have an old HP NetServer E800 from the early 90’s running Linux for my network, and it has never once crashed.

Then they decided to enter the consumer market, and compete on price instead of quality. After Compaq failed at trying this same marketing plan, and filed bankruptcy, HP bought them. They continued their downward tailspin, and started building unreliable PC’s and laptops that failed at regular intervals. I quit recommending HP equipment to my clients years ago due to their lack of reliability, and many other consultants did the same.

When Palm filed bankruptcy, HP bought them and decided to get into the smartphone and tablet business. But, they were never able to make a dent in that market. The OS was never user friendly, never got the 3rd party support which is necessary to compete in that market. So, this week they decided to shut down those divisions and sell off the PC division.

Wonder where I put that old Palm VIIx that I had before the BlackBerry…..

Good analysis.

Peter Lynch calls this "deworsifying." Instead of getting stronger by diversifying, the company gets worse. The bosses start saying, "We've got all this corporate cash and we'd like to get into this line of work that's sort of related to what we do. Hey, I know, let's buy this other company. They're struggling, but we're smarter than they are. We'll turn it around and it will make us both stronger." It rarely works out that way. Now somebody will pick up HP's spinoff businesses and it will take them down, too.

"Don’t do it. That’s because tablets are all about apps."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2011/08/21/thinki...

HP has a bad reputation for poor support and inferior quality products.

But won't. For the reasons mentioned in forbes article

Thanks

Why even bother with HP products,get the original and the BEST. Get an iPad!

Apple has always been good at marketing - making the people using their equipment feel "special". From the outset in the late 70s, Woz and Jobs have sold their products as "cutting edge" advanced technology, when they were really simply "trend-setting". Their advertising campaigns have been outstanding even when their products were not.

Kudos for the marketing, not always for the product.

You're correct. I recently broke down and bought an Apple iPad II. It does everything and it is much better than anything I have seen out there. It does it all. I love it.

2 Questions:

Does the HP tablet have built-in GPS?

Is there a windshield or dashboard mount for the HP tablet?

Reason 1: The iPad 3 is coming
Reason 2: Steve Jobs may not be hands-on
Reason 3: No removable storage
Reason 4: You already have an iPad
Reason 5: Competition
Reason 6: There’s still no USB port
Reason 7: You still have to use iTunes
Reason 8: There’s still no way to wirelessly synchronize your bookmarks
Reason 9: Kindles are still much less expensive
Reason 10: You can still only run software approved by Apple
Reason 11: It still can’t be used as a standalone computer

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/government/11-reasons-not-to-buy-a...

I've owned HP printers and was never happy with them. I bought a Palm T3 around 15 yrs ago, it recently took a dive off my desk and committed suicide. After several days of looking for a replacement I bought an Apple iPod. It does everything my T3 did and more in a smaller package and with better battery life. This is the first Apple product I've owned or used. If this iPod is typical of Apple products then I think my next computer will be an Apple.

My real "biggie" question re the HP tablet would be "Does the thing have an integral GPS?"

If not, not interested at all; if it *does*, it might be a nice "hacked pad" once the price goes down a bit more. (Long story short: Whilst WebOS is dead, there is presently a group working on Android ports to the HP touchpad. Different Linux derivative, the main thing will be adding/writing drivers for stuff.)

As much as I hate to say it (and this is coming from someone who cut their teeth on palmtops with the old Handspring Visor--the first non-Palm PalmOS box, dating back waaaay back to the days of PalmOS 3.1 ) WebOS was pretty much stillborn as a platform:

a) By the time it came out, Blackberry and Windows Mobile had eaten the lunch of PalmOS to the point that Palm itself had been borged by Handspring (formerly their major "clone competitor" and non-Palm PalmOS licensee), Nokia's Symbian had eaten its lunch in the rest of the world, and Android and iPhone were coming out and becoming popular. (In other words, too little, too late.)

b) No backwards compatibility (not even via emulators) for old PalmOS stuff--it was literally easier to run PalmOS stuff on Windows Mobile devices (via PalmOS emulators).

Unfortunately, it never had much of a chance...

(And pretty much RIM is committing slow suicide in the same way; they pretty much abandoned Blackberry's main OS too little, too late; they went with QNX, but offered no backwards compatibility path to Blackberry apps, and pretty much they're hanging on solely through legacy business customers.

(Nokia is ALMOST in the same boat--they had their own Linux derivative, Maemo, which did well--and then they killed off both Symbian and Maemo, and are now talking about becoming a Windows Mobile 7-exclusive manufacturer. WinMo 7 may save them or doom them, depending on how well WinMo 7 does as a smartphone platform; whilst there ARE some nice features to it, it's still a third-place OS behind iOS and Android.

(Speaking of WinMo 7--I'm actually amazed it's stuck around as long as it has; much like with QNX and Nokia's OS's and WebOS, there is no backwards compatibility with WinMo 6.5 and below (because the two OS's are based off different branches of the Windows CE family tree--the differences are akin to comparing, say, Windows 3.1 and Windows 7). Enough business users seem to like it enough that it's hanging in there, though.)

If it's cellular data capable, it would have to have a GPS in it - since devices that run on cellular networks are mandated to have GPS capabilities built-in (legacy cellular rule I believe...) otherwise, I'm just guessing here - but if there was no built-in GPS an external source of GPS data may be useable via a bluetooth puck, or some sort of physical dongle to be a GPS receiver for an HP Tablet... kind of like what I have for my Wifi iPad-1 that has no GPS internal to it - thus the BadElf device I use with my iPad.

Even if it's discontinued, it is still cheaper than a Kindle and you get a nice big color touch screen.

Simon

And as mentioned above, there's an Android porting project underway. That will be interesting.

Thanks for the heads up.

I am not sorry to see them go

The consumer laptops were/are disasters

Apple news:

http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpps/news/apple-says-steve-jobs-resi...

They are going to make one more run of the tablets since they sold out so quick. http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-11-days-...