Exclusive: HP's Android Tablet Tabled
Hewlett Packard is working on a variety of tablet PCs, running a variety of operating systems. Among them, an Android device that was supposed to arrive at market in the fourth quarter of 2010. But no longer. Sources in position to know tell …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second tablet program HP has pulled this year. In April, TechCrunch reported that HP would kill its Windows 7 Slate project weeks before launch — with leaked specs pointing to a $549 price and five-hour battery that compared poorly against Apple's iPad — and days later HP closed its confirmed $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm, putting webOS in-house.
Digital Daily now reports, via unnamed sources, that an Android tablet once slated for Q4 2010 has been tabled alongside it. If accurate, HP heads into the holiday quarter with no shipping tablet on any OS, and every road it hasn't closed leads back to the Palm platform it just bought. The claim remains unconfirmed; neither HP nor Google has acknowledged it.
First-order effects
- HP's tablet lineup empties out for Q4 2010: with the Windows 7 Slate dead and the Android device reportedly tabled, the company has nothing to counter the iPad during the holiday selling season.
Second-order effects
- Google loses one of the few major PC OEMs positioned to ship an Android tablet this year, leaving rivals like Dell and Samsung to carry Android's non-Apple tablet flag — and concentrating HP's tablet R&D spend on webOS instead of splitting it across two licensed platforms.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across HP's 2010 decisions points to tablets being treated as platform bets rather than product SKUs: owning an OS (via Palm) is increasingly seen as the price of competing with Apple vertically integrated stack, a standard that pressures every remaining licensee of someone else's mobile OS.
The trend: Post-iPad, major hardware makers are shifting from licensing whatever OS ships fastest toward proprietary platform ownership, with each cancelled third-party OS device marking another step in that consolidation.