On tablets and phones

As you can probably tell from my previous posts, I’m very interested in the tablet form factor for several reasons, chief among them is for reading magazines.  Apple has of course released its new iPad and since it’s not available in Canada yet I can’t really talk about its suitability from first-hand experience.  That said, so far it doesn’t yet seem to fit my needs from what others have said who have actually used it, but I can see its potential and the second generation might be exactly what I’m looking for. 

For now however there are other tablets on the horizon, and an interesting possibility has been raised that I hadn’t considered.  According to Jason Perlow of ZDNet, HP’s recent acquisition of Palm might hold some interesting prospects for the future.  I won’t rehash his entire post which you can read for yourself in the link above but he raises the possibility that HP might be able to put Palm’s awesome WebOS onto their concept HP Slate.

I’ve always thought that HP fancied itself to be a version of Apple.  Witness their Envy line of laptops (below), they look remarkably like Macbooks although they have much better hardware inside and can play games. Where Apple likes to make things white, HP likes to make them black (which I prefer).  Both sell consumer products like, well, laptops and computers but HP has been missing out on cell phones which are a huge part of Apple’s portfolio and now tablets.

Of course HP has assets in both areas, but their phones suck and their tablets have been limited to convertible laptops so far (I’m actually using the first generation HP convertible to type this post) running Windows 7.  Convertibles are fine, great in fact, but not conducive to reading magazines and eBooks in a comfortable way.  Now that Apple has popularized the slate form factor I’ve been hoping for some more competition in the market.

If HP does manage to put WebOS on a slate the outcome could be amazing.  Not only would they have a decent competitor to the iPad but they would have the chance to actually beat Apple in the slate market given WebOS’s superiority and potential.  WebOS phones, like my Palm Pre, can do things Apple phones can’t but that hasn’t been communicated very well - mostly because Palm is a small company with limited resources.  Throw in HP’s muscle however and things get interesting, especially if they put WebOS to good use on a tablet.

Of course HP hasn’t had a really good track record of buying companies and innovating with them.  They bought a high-end PC company called Voodoo and after a couple of years of teasing promising products shut it down.  Compaq is just another laptop now and their iPAQ smart phones are all but dead.  Hopefully the same fate does not await Palm.