Despite all the hubbub about CEO Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard posted great earnings for its quarter and the company confirmed that it will soon have multiple tablets to compete with the Apple iPad.
The company said the Apple iPad may have hurt the sales of some of its laptops but it said a Windows tablet will be coming soon, maybe even as soon as the next few weeks. This device will likely be based on Windows 7 and should target the enterprise market with corporate-friendly features like video conferencing and integration with back-end business databases.
What really gets me excited is that HP also confirmed it will bring out a webOS tablet in early 2011 and this will be a mass-market device. HP spent $1.2 billion to acquire Palm earlier this year and it plans to “double down” on the webOS platform by putting it in a variety of devices like smartphones, tablets and even printers.
I’m a fan of webOS because I think it’s an elegant and beautiful smartphone OS – in fact, it’s probably the best 1.0 version I’ve ever seen. The Palm hardware didn’t do it justice and I think the “cards” user interface metaphor would work extremely well on a big tablet.
Let’s hope the HP webOS tablet has at least a 1 GHz processor, WiFi, GPS, multiple cameras and a few USB ports. I could see 3G being useful but I think tablets will mainly use WiFi connections.
An HP webOS tablet couldn’t come soon enough, as the Apple iPad is gaining some serious momentum – it has sold more than three million units in a few months. We may even see a revamped Apple iPad in time for the holidays.
It’s not just Apple HP has to worry about, as we’re about to see a slew of tablets from companies like Samsung, Research In Motion, Asus, Toshiba and others. We’ve put together a list of the five most-anticipated tablets and you should check it out.
[Via VentureBeat]