Mark Budgell, who according to his LinkedIn profile is “PR Manager, Social Media Strategy at Hewlett-Packard”, is getting everyone’s panties in a bunch thanks to the picture above that he just uploaded to Twitter. The full text of his tweet suggests that HP may be showing something off at South by Southwest (SXSW) during the Interactive 2011 event scheduled to take place in March 2011:
See @PhilMcKinney playing w mysterious #gadgets http://twitpic.com/2jeq97 Want to know more? Vote for #SXSW panel http://bit.ly/d4Ljk3M
Now that’s a long ways off, but if we had to guess … we’d say that looks like what’s possibly HP’s first tablet device running webOS and a successor to the much hyped, yet abysmal failure, known as the Palm Pre. Why would Mark show off stuff that isn’t going to be announced for half a year? It’s not something I’d want my “PR Manager of Social Media Strategy” to do. They could learn something from Nokia, who upsets people year after year by announcing awesome hardware and then not shipping it until several months later. Take the Nokia N8 for example, announced April 27th, yet today is August 30th, a full 4 months later, and the device has yet to hit shelves and probably isn’t going to be on the market until the end of September. That’s a 5 month gap.
Apple, love them or hate them, shows off stuff and then ships it either in the same month or 2 months later like they did with the iPad. Who knows what the market will look like 6 months from now? You’ve got Microsoft with their Windows Phone 7 operating system, Google with Gingerbread and Honeycomb and Chrome OS, Nokia with MeeGo 1.0, and then Mobile World Congress 2011 where we’ll undoubtedly see something that makes us foam from the mouth.
I don’t know Mark. I think you’ve made a mistake with that tweet, but luckily the internet has ADD and will most likely forget what you said by Wednesday.
[Via: Gizmodo]