There are a variety of tablet-like computing devices in the works. But, assuming that the hardware form factor is similar to the deceased HP Slate, but with WebOS as the platform–here are five reasons that the HP Hurricane tablet will make a formidable competitor for the Apple iPad.

1. Adobe Flash: While Apple continues its public jihad against Adobe Flash–and draws the regulatory scrutiny of the DOJ and the GTC–other platforms such as Android and WebOS are working with Adobe to develop Flash software compatible with their mobile platforms. HTML5 may be the future, but there is no denying that Adobe Flash is a ubiquitous standard regardless of any flaws it might have–real or perceived.
2. Dual Cameras A tablet device may be a tad bulky or cumbersome to use for taking snapshots, but the option would certainly come in handy. Granted, I can take a picture with my smartphone instead–and through some convoluted combination of tasks manage to get them to the iPad so I can draw moustaches on the photos with Adobe Ideas (see- Apple didn’t ban everything Adobe makes from the iPad).

   More importantly for mobile business professionals, a front-facing camera allows the tablet to be used for Skype video calls, and other face-to-face video conferencing solutions.

3. Expandability The iPad is intentionally a closed environment. The lack of USB ports or SD memory card slots fits with the basic culture of the iPad as a Web-enabled mobile media platform, but business professionals need to be able to simply plug in a USB thumb drive and read or copy files.

   While not explicitly prescribed, the iPad camera connection kit apparently offers an alternative to enable some USB capabilities, but an HP Hurricane with a USB port and/or SD memory card slot would be a huge advantage.

4. Distribution channels. Then we get down to the nitty gritty. Forget the features of the hardware or the capabilities of the platform. An HP Hurricane tablet can crush an Apple iPad just by virtue of HP’s massive global enterprise distribution channels. HP has an existing vendor relationship with most major corporations. As long as HP can demonstrate the benefits and value of the Hurricane tablet it will be able to leverage those relationships to distribute the device en masse.
5. HP brand Apple has its dedicated and loyal following. I wouldn’t dare imply that HP has anywhere near the dedication from its customers. But, as the largest computer manufacturer in the world it does have a respected reputation–especially in the business world where Apple often struggles.

   I think it was a wise decision by HP to shift gears from the Windows 7-based Slate to the WebOS-based Hurricane. The tablet–at least the way Apple has envisioned it with the iPad–is a culture shift, not just a new form factor.

   HP is in a strong position, though, to combine its brand prowess and understanding of the needs of mobile business professionals, with the WebOS platform, and lessons learned from the iPad, and create a tablet device capable of challenging the iPad, and with an edge on the iPad when it comes to the business professional audience.

Resource:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/195993/five_reasons_hp_hurricane_can_compete_with_ipad.html

Deals

Analysts say 2010’s third-largest U.S. tech acquisition grants Palm’s devices global production and distribution reach while launching the world’s top PC maker into a tech arena experiencing blistering growth.

The news on Wednesday surprised many on Wall Street, since much of the long-running takeover speculation surrounding Palm had shifted in recent weeks to focus on potential Asian bidders, such as China’s Lenovo (0992.HK).

An early pioneer in handheld devices, Palm once dominated the market but has since been surpassed by Apple’s iPhone and Research in Motion’s (RIM.TO) BlackBerry. Palm put out a new mobile operating system, the well-reviewed webOS, last year but even that has been overshadowed by Google Inc’s (GOOG.O) Android software.

In a sign of Palm’s struggles, the money-losing company headed by Jon Rubinstein — an ex-Apple executive famous for developing the iPod — slashed revenue expectations for the current quarter. It said slow product sales have led to low order volumes from carriers.

“If you saw the guidance Palm just put out, it was clear they had to sell,” said Phil Cusick, analyst at Macquarie Research. “Given how quickly Palm’s business was falling off and how fast their cash was going out the door, they’re lucky to get what they got.

Palm reported losses for each of its last two fiscal years.

Shares of Palm, 30 percent owned by Elevation Partners, jumped 27 percent to $5.88, above HP’s $5.70 cash offer. Some investors could be betting on a higher bid, while others could be covering short positions on the heavily shorted stock, analysts said..

HP said the deal for Palm, which both boards have approved, valued the company at $1.2 billion including debt. Based on Palm’s latest filing, the deal values Palm’s 167.892 million shares outstanding at $957 million.

Analysts said HP has deep pockets to invest in Palm, can expand its carrier relationships and negotiate better component pricing from existing suppliers.

“PC companies don’t need cellphone-type margins to make the model work; they can be much more price-aggressive in capturing share and will certainly drive margins down for everyone else,” said Avi Cohen at Avian Securities.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch advised HP, while Goldman Sachs advised Palm.

GOOD DEAL OR NOT?

HP’s foray into the fiercely contested smartphone arena, while it may not immediately threaten Apple, and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, may increase pressure on Nokia (NOK1V.HE), Motorola (MOT.N) and other device manufacturers now battling to expand their market share.

“Nokia will be one of the most affected players,” said IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo. Because of a “wrong portfolio and lack of carrier support, Nokia never moved from its eighth position…in the smartphone segment. This deal puts also pressure on Motorola and HTC.”

Others, however, were more skeptical about HP’s ability to turn around Palm, whose Pre and Pixi phones have withered in the face of fierce competition.

“If HP wants to have a global role in the mobile space, spending $1.2 billion in Palm is not the way. Palm has no brand outside the U.S., and it has no distribution outside the U.S.” said John Strand, chief executive of Strand Consult.

“To pay $1.2 billion for a U.S.-centric mobile player that’s not successful is a first-class way to destroy shareholder value. Palm has tried to move from the PDA world into the mobile world for eight years without success,” Strand said.

According to Gartner, Palm held 1.2 percent of the global smartphone market in 2009, compared with Nokia’s (NOK1V.HE) 41.1 percent, RIM’s 19.9 percent and Apple’s 14.4 percent.

Despite Palm’s shortcomings, persistent takeover rumors have attracted many investors to the heavily shorted stock. For example, Philip Falcone’s hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners LLC bought Palm shares on April 12, when they were trading between $5.43 and $6.29, and had a 9.48 percent stake.

The deal may mark the culmination of a long-running effort by private equity firm Elevation Partners, the private equity firm that boasts U2 frontman Bono among its partners.

Elevation — which bought a quarter of Palm for $325 million in 2007 — had brought in numerous ex-Apple executives over the years in hopes of turning the company around, including Rubinstein.

It was unclear how much Elevation, which has invested about $460 million in Palm, made or lost.

Some investment banking sources had thought that Lenovo (0992.HK) was the leading candidate to buy Palm after the U.S. company was rebuffed by other potential Asian buyers including HTC Corp (2498.TW) and Huawei HWT.UL.

Palm now expects fiscal fourth quarter revenue in the range of $90 million to $100 million, compared with its mid-March forecast that revenue would be less than $150 million.

Todd Bradley, executive vice president of HP’s computer division, said the company plans to “invest heavily” in Palm, increasing spending on sales and marketing and research and development in the hope of spurring the developer community into writing more applications for the platform.

Palm’s app universe now has more than 2,000 applications, dwarfed by Apple’s App store with closer to 200,000 apps.

Bradley also said Palm’s platform is attractive for an entire ecosystem of mobile devices, from smartphones to slate devices to netbooks.

HP Executives expected a few cents” dilution for from the deal in the second half of fiscal 2010 and “mild” impact in 2011 — for a company that in the fiscal first quarter reported non-GAAP earnings of $1.07 per share.

“Coupled with our scale, global reach and investments in the ecosystem, we expect we will see solid growth,” he said.

HP already has a smartphone, the iPaq, which runs on Microsoft’s (MSFT.O) Windows mobile platform. But the device has gained little traction in a crowded market.

Rubinstein is expected to remain with the company, HP said in a statement, adding that the acquisition would likely close during its third fiscal quarter ending July 31.

Shares of HP fell 1 percent to $52.75 in extended trading from their New York Stock Exchange close of $53.28.

HP “would be one of the few companies that I think could successfully turn Palm around. The company has great brand, great international distribution,” said C.L. King Associates’ analyst Lawrence Harris. “That will open a lot of doors.”

Resource:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63R5HO20100429

Apple’s iPad sold 300,000 units by midnight April 3, including pre-orders, on its first day of general release: enough to ensure the device as a commercial hit, at least in the short-term. In a larger way, though, those sales numbers represent not so much a victory for Apple but a sign that a market indeed exists for consumer-oriented tablets. As companies ranging from Hewlett-Packard to Nokia prepare similar tablet PCs in coming months, Apple’s hardware choices and rollout could become the competitive benchmark by which these competitors map their own choices and strategy.

Some signs of that shift are already present in HP’s strategy for its upcoming tablet, with videos and a company blog showing off the device’s ability to video conference and snap images. HP has also highlighted its Slate’s support of Adobe Flash, which powers rich content on many popular Websites. By contrast, the iPad does not support Flash, nor does the current version include a camera—both things that HP seems eager to highlight as the competitive differentiator for its own offering, due at an as-yet-unannounced point later in 2010.

“With this slate product, you’re getting a full Web browsing experience in the palm of your hand. No watered-down Internet, no sacrifices,” Phil McKinney, vice president and chief technology officer for Hewlett-Packard’s Personal Systems Group, wrote in a March 8 posting on the company’s Voodoo Blog. “A big bonus for the slate product is that, being based off Windows 7, it offers full Adobe support.”

McKinney followed that up a few weeks later with another Voodoo Blog post touting the HP slate’s other abilities.

“Think about the last time you chatted with friends over Skype on your notebook,” McKinney wrote on April 5. “Or uploaded a picture from your mobile phone to Facebook or Flickr. How about the last time you viewed images or video from an SD card or USB device. We know that you expect to be able to capture and share digital content on your mobile devices.”

That same day, Engadget posted an image of what it claimed was an internal HP presentation comparing the specs of the company’s upcoming tablet PC to the iPad. That document suggested that the “HP Slate” would retail for between $549 and $599, and feature a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 processor, inward-facing VGA Webcam and outward-facing 3-megapixel camera. Windows 7 Home Premium, tethered to a proprietary HP touch-optimized user interface, will serve as the operating system.

Nokia is also developing a tablet competitor for entrance into the market later this year, according to recent online reports.

“Right now the supply chain (for a Nokia tablet) is being primed up for a fall release. It has to be on the shelf by September-October to meet demand for the holiday window,” Rodman and Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar told Reuters on April 7. “You don’t want to give that much of a lead to Apple because otherwise it becomes insurmountable.”

Nokia apparently declined to comment on those supposed developments. Other manufacturers, including Fujitsu and Fusion Garage, have tablets in some stage of active development. This year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas highlighted a number of laptops with touch-screen functionality, including the HP Touchsmart tm2 and Fujitsu Lifebook T4410, designed with an eye towards both the tablet and traditional PC markets.

But how will these tablets market themselves? HP and Fusion Garage, creator of the JooJoo tablet, are already touting their Flash support in a bid to slice off some iPad market-share. (Recent online reviews of the JooJoo’s Flash support have been unkind.) Other manufacturers could follow that same route, using Flash support to set themselves apart, whether or not their device uses Windows 7 or another, more proprietary user interface.

“By ignoring a pervasively widely used technology like Flash and treating its parent company with disrespect,” Charles Kind, an analyst with Pund-IT Research, wrote in a March 10 research note, “Jobs opened the door he must have preferred to leave closed: providing his competitors the opportunity [to] define these devices, technologies and markets far more clearly than he himself has done.”

On April 5, HP released a 30-second video demonstrating its slate’s video conferencing and image-snapping abilities, suggesting that both it and other companies may use embedded cameras as another differentiator over the iPad.

Yet despite the hoopla surrounding the iPad’s launch, and other companies’ aggressive entrance into the space, the tablet market is still nascent; as one analyst warns, simply because Apple managed to sell a few hundred thousand units during its new product’s first weekend on the open market doesn’t mean that others will be able to reproduce a similar feat, extra hardware and Flash support or no.

“The market will play host to a flood of ‘me too’ tablets in 2010, but it’s an immature product category with an unproven use case,” CCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber told Reuters in an April 7 article. “Apple’s brand and service offering means the iPad will be an exception in a category that will struggle to gain consumer acceptance.”

Resource:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Apple-iPad-Sets-Tablet-Bar-for-Nokia-HP-Microsoft-801771/

The last time we saw the Slate was in the hands of Steve Ballmer during a rather tepid presentation in Las Vegas, with Ballmer showing off the Kindle reader and struggling a bit as he tried to tee up a video. But HP has clearly stepped up its game, starting with this snazzy 30-second teaser video that makes a point of showing off all the features on the Slate that are missing on the iPad, such as a built-in camera, a USB port (a real one, not an adapter), and an SD card slot.

Just a few hours after the video was posted, Engadget managed to snag what appears to be an HP marketing sheet — titled, none too subtly, “HP Slate vs. iPad” — that specifically stacks up the Slate to the iPad, point for point. Now, before we dive into the details here, let’s just point out that HP has yet to officially cough up detailed specs for the Slate, much less a price tag or a release date (other than “this year,” that is). Still, if what we’re looking at here is real, it’s a pretty clear indication that HP is positioning the Slate as an iPad killer.

Looking at the (purported) spec sheet, the Slate appears to have a series of enticing features that are missing on the iPad. There’s the camera, of course, and we’re not just talking one but two: a 3MP lens in back and a front-facing VGA camera for video conferencing. We’ve also got a single USB 2.0 port, an SD card reader, a “conventional” SIM tray for 3G networking, and HDMI-out video capabilities (not to mention 1080p playback) via the Slate’s dock connector. (Each of these key points are highlighted on the leaked marketing sheet as an “HP advantage,” by the way.)

Pretty interesting, and here’s a few more details to boot (again, not official): an 8.9-inch, 1024-by-600-pixel display (slightly smaller and lower-res than the iPad), a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor under the hood, and 32 or 64GB of built-in flash storage (expandable via the SD card slot). The spec sheet doesn’t mention Flash support specifically, but HP has already made it pretty clear that yes, you will be able to view Flash videos on the Slate.

The leaked spec sheet describes the Slate as measuring 9.2 by 5.7 by 0.57 inches, making the Slate (potentially) a tad taller, narrower, and thicker than the iPad (9.56 by 7.47 by 0.5 inches), as well as a tiny bit lighter (1.49 pounds, vs. 1.5 pounds for the iPad).

The leaked marketing sheet also ticks off a few specs labeled as “HP threat” — in other words, areas in which the iPad would have a leg up over the Slate, at least for now. Among them: no support for 802.11n, the latest official Wi-Fi standard; just five hours of battery life, versus 10 hours for the iPad; and a slightly more expensive price tag for the 16GB model ($549, versus $499 for the 16GB iPad) — although, to be fair (and if the leaked specs are true), the $549 16GB Slate might come with a SIM tray, whereas the equivalent 3G-enabled iPad will set you back $629.

Of course, one of the biggest selling points for the Slate (and yes, this we know for certain) is Windows 7, a full-on, multitasking, desktop-caliber operating system. The iPad runs on a modified version of the iPhone OS, and among other things lacks third-party-app multitasking (although that may be changing soon). Then again, the iPad OS is specifically designed for touch and runs lightning-fast; Windows 7 is designed for a keyboard and mouse (HP is promising a “touch-optimized UI” to help with fingertip navigation). And it remains to be seen whether Slate’s 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor will be up to the task of making Windows 7 run smoothly on a 1.5-pound tablet.

Let’s just say one more time that the leaked marketing sheet obtained by Engadget isn’t official; and even if it is real, the listed specs are certainly subject to change; and again, we still don’t have an official price tag.

Still, if the Slate proves anything, it’s that the tablet wars won’t end with the iPad; indeed, they’re only beginning. If the iPad turns out to be a hit (and the jury’s still out), it’ll spur more competition in the tablet “space” (“Courier,” anyone?), and that’s a good thing.

Resource:
Yahoo News