We are now just a couple weeks until Apple releases its highly contentious iPad and you can rest assured that Apple fans have been preordering like crazy and there will almost certainly be lines at the Apple stores in early April for the “Mega iPhone”.
While Apple is putting its eggs in the basket of the smartphone model of a basic OS tied to an app store, HP is looking to storm the market with a tablet that can run Windows 7 fully with the ability to run media and normal windows applications. Analyst, Bob O’Donnell of IDC views the HP approach as safe, “In some ways, Windows and Intel is a safe bet…You have things that are important for people like Adobe Flash, and a lot of other things that people are used to. The question is how do people use them: like a big smart phone or a totally different way. That remains to be seen.”
One thing the iPad does have going for it is a slim design and decent battery life, per Apple. This is achieved by using a modified version of the iPhone OS and Apple’s own battery and processor technology. The question is: Can HP imitate the battery life for a full-featured OS and keep the device at a size so that is commensurate to the iPad? It sure wouldn’t hurt the use NVidia’s Tegra processor, which is already powering Microsoft’s Zune HD platform.
Here’s what we think we know about the HP tablet so far:
Price: €400 or about $546 (depending on conversion rates), maybe $400 in the US.
Availability: This Summer (around June)
Processor: Atom-like processor
Flash Support: Yes
USB: Yes
Webcam: Yes
Memory Card Reader: Yes
Multitasking: Yes
Operating System: Windows 7
Can we even compare the two devices? On one hand we have a device that is slimmed to take advantage of the app store and multimedia and on the other hand we have a device that is geared to take advantage of a full OS. Which method will work? It will essentially come down to what the tablet user actually uses their device for. If the tablet user is nothing more than an extreme iPhone user, the iPad will be champ. If the tablet user needs more from the device by way of applications and multitasking, the Windows 7 device will win. Then again, there is not necessarily one kind of user out there, so we may see a similar-looking device, but with two very different audiences.
Sources: TFTS, San Fran Chronicle
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