HP tells employees webOS tablet coming Q1 2011
We've been trying to find out when HP would launch a webOS tablet since the company first bought Palm, and we're now hearing from several trusted sources that it'll be calendar Q1 2011. We're told Personal Systems Group VP Todd Bradley mentioned …
Context & Ripple Effects
HP closed its $1.2 billion bidding-war acquisition of Palm in late April, and by July reporting indicated the company had tabled an Android-based tablet in favor of its newly owned platform. This report — flagged as sourced but unconfirmed — says HP has told employees, with Personal Systems Group VP Todd Bradley cited, that the first webOS tablet is targeted for calendar Q1 2011.
The timing compounds the stakes: the report lands days after CEO Mark Hurd's abrupt August 7 resignation, with his successor still an open question, so a committed tablet-and-webOS roadmap is taking shape at HP before anyone knows who will be running the company.
First-order effects
- HP's Personal Systems Group gets an internal delivery window — Q1 2011 — that turns the Palm buy from an open-ended asset into a dated product commitment, assuming the sourced claim holds.
- The shelving of HP's Android tablet effort means the company's tablet bets are now concentrated entirely on webOS rather than split across platforms.
Second-order effects
- webOS developers — the audience Palm was already courting through channels like its June AT&T app-development seminar — gain a launch window to build against, which determines whether the platform has apps worth buying the tablet for.
- HP's tablet rivals face a competitor whose differentiation rests on owned software rather than another Android slate, pressuring the crowded Android-tablet field to justify itself on something other than specs.
Third-order effects
- If the Q1 2011 target holds, HP becomes the test case for whether a PC incumbent can convert an acquired mobile OS into hardware differentiation — a playbook distinct from licensing someone else's platform.
- Whoever succeeds Mark Hurd inherits a consumer-device strategy already committed under his tenure, making webOS's fate partly a referendum on a CEO the board has yet to name.
The trend: PC makers are moving from licensing third-party mobile operating systems to owning acquired platforms as their tablet differentiator.