HP is reportedly planning to re-enter the consumer tablet space. A year after the company killed off the HP TouchPad tablet (after only two months on the market), The Verge reports that HP is creating a new Mobility business unit to focus on consumer tablets, among other things.

 

HP Slate 500
HP Slate 500

The HP TouchPad was the result of HP’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm. When the tablet didn’t immediately sell very well, then CEO Leo Apotheker killed the project entirely, and the company wound up losing even more money than it spent on Palm.

Now Apotheker has been replaced by former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, and it looks like HP is ready to take another swipe at the tablet space. HP executives have said a few times over the past year that new tablets featuring Windows 8 would be on the way.

But The Verge obtained a leaked memo which provides the first details about the new mobility division at HP — one that doesn’t seem to be affiliated with the remnants of the Palm/webOS team.

The memo also confirms that HP will soon launch a “commercial tablet,” but that it will be managed by the company’s PC division… much like the HP Slate 500 and HP Slate 2 Windows 7 tablets before it.

The new division will be headed by Alberto Torres, a former Nokia executive in charge of the company’s work on the MeeGo operating system.

 

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4 replies on “HP to give this whole consumer tablet thing another go”

  1. The HP Slate was nice. Anyone know of any claimed performance improvements of the next batch of Atoms when running Windows 7/8?

    1. I do not know about Atoms, but I installed Windows 8 on a 4 year old laptop and can definitely feel the difference. Windows 8 feels faster and my computer runs cooler than it did before.

  2. It seems natural that a company selling a lot of Windows laptops would also want to sell a Windows tablet since that’s what the next version of Windows is targeting. Hopefully they don’t think they can sell something made of cheap materials, short battery life and high priced. Any tablet that comes out is going to have to be as good or better than the iPad in terms of performance, materials, battery life, size/weight and price. I think that’s going to be tough for HP based on their current designs. I hope they take design cues from their Envy line.

    1. The upcoming Clover Trail based tablets should help quite a bit. Basically being a dual core version of Medfield means Clover Trail based tablets can be designed more like ARM based tablets and have pretty close to similar run times.

      While still retaining the advantages of being x86. So can run Windows 8 instead of Windows RT, etc.

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