HP's Slate: The Latest News
What’s the best way to beat Apple’s tablet – to deliver to the market 2 tablets at once. It’s quite a strange and a bit silly scenario. But it seems that HP is really sticking to it. The company seems to have understood that the old partner is worth 2 new ones and returned to its initial project to deliver a Windows 7 tablet to the market. The decision to launch a tablet on the base of the webOS platform taken after Palm’s acquisition, however, is not to be given up. So, two tablets are to be revealed by HP’s developers in the near future.
Of course, it’s quite clear that the tablets can not be the same and bear the similar functionalities as it makes no sense delivering to the market two devices using the same hardware but different OS. According to the company’s strategy the tablets will focus different target audience: enterprise customers get the Windows versions while general consumers enjoy webOS one.
In general, the whole idea works just fine as HP Personal Systems Group VP Todd Bradley stated that Slate should be “more customer-specific than broadly deployed.” If we think it over, we might agree, as there are lots of highly specialized lines of business software which use only Microsoft’s operating system. For the greatest part of these LOB applications some Slate running a simple remote desktop application will work just fine. There are really great many spheres where Windows-based Slate can be of use. For example, it is excellent for the healthcare industry, as the IT ecosystem is completely based on Windows and mobile computing is really indispensable for the industry.
2-platform tablet is really a challenge for the company, as demands twice as much servicing, maintaining and supporting as a regular tablet. Moreover, both tablets will be more viable if there is some portability layer which allows running the same apps on both tablets across both operating systems. Such an approach would be able to boost the popularity of both platforms with developers, which is extremely important as none of the OS can boast of refined and numerous application base. The popularity with developers will ensure the ultimate popularity with consumers.