It’s easy to pick on a company when they’re down and despite some good moves in the last year by HP, they’re still down. With that said, what was behind the decision to launch their business-friendly Windows 8 tablet in January? Being that its primary audience will be the business world, Christmas may not be as important, but they’re still missing out on a portion of the potential sales. More importantly, they will be following several other big-launch tablets, including some Windows 8 competitors. Lastly, this was first teased during the Olympics. Why is it coming out next year? According to Engadget:…

When Meg Whitman declared late last year that WebOS tablets would be made again in 2013, the concept was met with hope by developers. As a newly-released open source platform, webOS on tablets would allow faster advancements than what can be done strictly in-house, so it made sense that the company whose financial fortunes are in doubt to release some employees from the division. The releases occurred today, but it wasn’t what most expected. Rather than simply software people, many of the 275 employees released worked on the hardware side. That’s not a good sign of things to come for HP, webOS tablets,…

There are certain qualities that a leader of a company can bring to the table. Leadership and decision making are often (but not always) crucial. Understanding of a product and the market they’re in is essential. And then there’s headlines… When Léo Apotheker was asked by HP to step down today to make room for Whitman as President and CEO, few outside of the tech industry could recognize (or pronounce) his name, let alone his face. He didn’t create buzz. He wasn’t in the headlines. Meg Whitman has been and will be. At the end of the day, that’s one of the most important aspects of leading a large company….

Meg Whitman’s name has always done well in business. Despite not becoming governor of California, her career with eBay and other tech firms (including being on the board at Hewlett-Packard) has nearly always been accompanied by success. In short, she’s tech-firm gold. It’s no surprise that Whitman is being considered to take the top spot as CEO of HP. If she is indeed offered the position and accepts, there will be renewed buzz surrounding the company, one that has been relatively quiet for some time now (other than their failed incursion into the tablet market). She would be a strong leader and…

The end of a very short era at HP is around the corner as they announced internally that the employee purchase program surrounding the HP TouchPad opens up at 9:00 am Pacific on September 28th, giving them the opportunity to buy the 16GB version for $99.99 and the 32GB version for $149.99 while supplies last. Many will end up on eBay where they’re currently selling for $200 or more. There was a good amount of excitement surrounding the release of HP’s first (and maybe last) tablet back in February, 2011. The slow sales and lack of developer adoption for webOS doomed the device. Since then, Microsoft…

The vultures are circling the failed webOS-powered hardware victims, particularly the developers who have been making their money around building apps on the platform. Brandon Watson, the man responsible for apps and developers for Windows Phones, sent out a tweet on Friday to attract a response. The response has been huge. Currently, nearly 1000 webOS developers have attempted to take him up on his offer. To qualify, developers must have at least one application published on the webOS App Catalog. With Android and iOS exploding with apps and being hit up by tens of thousands of developers…

Once upon a time, Steve Jobs said that Apple didn’t want to get into touchscreen desktop computing because it was unnatural to use a vertical touchscreen for extended periods of time, and that it ultimately led to fatigue. Of course, Steve typically knows his interaction design well enough that you don’t mess with him when he makes such a proclamation – and if you’ve ever used a vertical touchscreen yourself, it isn’t long before you realize he’s right. Vertical touchscreens suck. Enter HP, who have clearly taken Steve’s words to heart and unveiled a new line of PCs that needn’t give you Carpal Tunnel…

You hear the term ‘iPad Killer’ an awful lot, don’t you? Well, like, I guess you would if you read tech blogs with any regularity. If you’ve trickled all the way down to Techi, I’ll assume you do, and I’ll also assume ergo that you have, in fact, heard the term ‘iPad Killer’ an awful lot. So we’ll start with that. Anyway, I’m not going to talk about an iPad Killer today. Good grief, am I ever not. Today, I will regale you with a tale of the HP Slate, the real goddamned expensive tablet that sucks out loud – for the price, anyway. To be fair, the Slate isn’t the worst machine in the world; this is, of course, presuming…

Palm Web OS is now officially resigned to the history books. It was really only a matter of time, but now the official title of the mobile OS is HP WebOS. After a bit of a rocky start in the Palm Pre, WebOS essentially tanked because of lack of polish compared to other mobile operating systems. Well, WebOS is back, and apparently it’s now a strong contender. The OS now features true multitasking, an updated version of Synergy, Palm’s interesting social media integration software, Adobe Flash and a number of other advancements. The first device to run HP WebOS 2.0 will be the Palm Pre 2, released in France…

The Palm Pre, Palm’s  last ditch effort to overthrow the iPhone as king of mobile and bounce back to profitability is getting an upgrade. The Palm Pre 2 is the first real announcement from Palm since they were bought out by HP, so it’ll be interesting to see what if any influence HP has over the new hardware. Details are currently light. All we know at this point is that the device will run the next version of Palm’s WebOS software, WebOS 2.0, and contain a 1ghz CPU and 512mb of RAM, kind of a no-brainer if you’ve been following mobile tech for the past couple of months. The Pre was a great potential competitor…