Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman took the stage at a conference held by Morgan Stanley in San Francisco on Tuesday to talk about HP’s shift of focus from PCs to tablets. It may have seemed like the company was dipping its toe in “post-PC” platforms recently with its new Pavilion Chromebook and Slate 7 products, but if that’s what you thought you underestimated the size of the shift...
Not softly-softly catchy monkey but “blitzkrieg monkey”
Yesterday Whitman declared “We're not incrementally changing the business, we are shifting resources from PCs to tablets, from one operating system to another, from one kind of chipset to another.”
“In September 2011 we were nowhere on mobility, so we're catching up fast but we have to manage these transitions when they were perhaps not managed as well as they could have been” said Whitman at the Morgan Stanley conference. With its multiple OSes and form factors and chipsets on offer HP hopes to meet “specific needs of customer segments”.
Following Whitman’s revelations Tech Radar interviewed HP's Head of Mobility Alberto Torres today about the company’s push into the mobile space. Torres started by saying “The mission in my area is to make HP a leader in the tablet space and eventually smartphones.” However he did sound a note of caution “Certainly it's not a short term aim. It's not something we're looking at for this year.”
Following up, Tech Radar quizzed Torres about this year’s possibilities with regards to gaining a “noticeable” share of the tablet market in 2013, to which he replied “Yes, I would say this year that's realistic, but over time we are looking at a leadership position. We want to be up in the charts. I think it's possible. Also you have a little bit of a phenomenon where about a third of tablets are built by no-name vendors and most of them are very poor products”. He added “It's not going to happen overnight, it's going to be a journey. Over the next three years we're going to make big strides. And this year I think we'll get some significant volume on some of these products.”
Early judgements of the HP Slate 7 are in
We covered the announcement of the HP Slate 7 here on HEXUS and just looking at the specs, design and price the readership weren’t that impressed by HP’s fledgling Android effort. If this is an example of what HP will be doing from now on wallets aren’t going to be flying open in its direction.
Android Police are one of several sites to have a hands-on and poke about with the Slate 7 and should know what they’re talking about with regards to Android stuff. The hands-on review, subtitled “It's Just Another Cheap Tablet You Shouldn't Buy” was quite dismissive of HP’s first Android tab. The reviewer said that the Slate 7’s sluggishness when compared to the Nexus 7 competition was “just the top of the drawback iceberg”. Also notable was the “terrible” screen.
TechCrunch was also unimpressed with the Slate 7, its hands-on article title described it as “Just HP’s Latest Beige Box, Only Flat”. However the analysis of HP’s first outing into Android tablets asserted that it wasn’t so important if the Slate 7 was uninspiring or even “generic”, as the HP brand could carry it in retailers given the right price. “The HP Slate 7 is HP playing to its strengths.This is HP moving units, not creating the next big thing,” suggested TechCrunch’s Matt Burns.
So if HP is going to innovate in the mobile space, or even needs to, we don’t have any evidence of it as yet. Let’s look forward to some HP mobile products in 2013 that live up to the CEO’s “design focus” mantra.
