Hewlett Packard is making another attempt at finding its place in the tablet and smartphone market. At least that is what the rumour mill suggests. ReadWrite has reported that HP is working its socks off, and developing a new Android tablet.
According to the website, HP’s first Android device would be a high-end tablet, and one of the first tablets to arrive with the Nvidia Tegra 4 chip. The sources speaking with ReadWrite seemed to suggest that an announcement from the company’s side could me made very soon.
Additionally, the sources also indicate that a smartphone could also be in development. However, we must put this into perspective with HP CEO, Meg Whitman’s comments late last year at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo where she said that HP would not be offering a smartphone in 2013.
The tablet has apparently been in the works since before Thanksgiving last year. Despite Nvidia showing off the impressive Tegra 4 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year, not many tablets have actually welcomed it on board, yet. Having said that, we must specify that Toshiba and Vizio are set to be working on Tegra 4 devices, mostly tablets, but have not hit the markets yet.
The bigger question still remains – is it too late for HP to succeed in the Android smartphone and tablet market? For smartphones, it will have to content with competition from Samsung and HTC, before coming face to face with the likes of Apple. In tablets too, Samsung has pretty much gotten the market sewn up, and then the iPad to deal with before the finish line.
It’s unclear whether the reports of HP adopting Android are true, but if it is, this could be a huge development for Google, for the future. Google wants to get Android into the PC space, and HP could help do that. Despite a last couple of lackluster years, the company’s PC business has recently overtaken Lenovo, in terms of the number of units shipped.
If HP can get back into the tablet space again, and Android can help it get a semblance of presence in the space, Google will surely want to leverage this partnership to the maximum, by pushing Android into the PC ecosystem. The Chromebook could just be the start of the beautiful partnership.
Source: ReadWrute