Maybe it’s that $169 price, or maybe it’s the inclusion of an honest-to-goodness memory card reader, but we know some of you can’t wait to get your mitts on HP’s new Slate 7 Android tablet. Back when it was first announced, the company indicated it’d be available by April, but it would seem that plan has changed: the product page on HP’s site is now saying the Slate won’t arrive until sometime in June. We’re not sure why there’s a delay (we’re asking for comment), but we do know this can’t be good news for HP. By June, after all, Google I/O will have come and gone, and the next-gen Nexus 7 might already be on sale.
[Thanks, jmartj]
Update: HP has confirmed that it made a mistake in listing a June 2013 arrival date on the Slate 7’s product page. In fact, the tablet is still slated (har) to arrive in April. Carry on.
This year’s Mobile World Congress served as a launchpad for HP to announce its upcoming Slate 7 Android tablet that will be priced aggressively against the Kindle Fire and other budget-minded tablets at $169. The Slate 7 was expected to be released this April, but it looks as through your dream of owning it next month will keep being a dream as HP has quietly delayed its release to June.
Instead of making a big to do about its delay, HP updated the Slate 7′s product page to say it will be released in June. There’s no official word from HP as to what the exact issue is that resulted in their upcoming tablet to be delayed, but we’re sure we’ll hear something from the company in due time. Hopefully its delay won’t result in less sales as some potential Android tablet customers may be looking at the next-generation Nexus 7.
It was last summer when we were introduced to the HP Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook, resulting in us completely falling in love with its gorgeous 15.6-inch 1080p IPS display that was able to produce some nice colors and its view angles were exceptional. The Spectre XT TouchSmart also wowed us with its high-quality aluminum chassis, although we left the experience concerned about its weight and battery life.
Now that we have been able to spend some serious quality time with the ultrabook, it’s time to give you a rundown of what you could expect if you’re considering picking up an HP Spectre XT TouchSmart. (more…)
Hewlett-Packard may not be well-known by consumers for creating the machines that power the industries that power the world we live in, but the company’s workstation business does just that. From film to oil drilling to medicine, HP’s workstations have their hands in a lot of pies — and today, that expands more directly to yet another major industry: video games. With its Z1, Z820 and Z620 workstations, HP is collaborating with Epic Games, Autodesk, and ALT Systems to create what they’re calling a “turnkey solution” to game development workstation woes. The three aforementioned units can be customized to arrive with a variety of variables, including Unreal Engine 4, Autodesk, and NVIDIA GTX-line GPUs.
In so many words, ALT Systems will take the disparate pieces of hardware and software from HP, NVIDIA, Autodesk and Epic Games to provide an all-in-one buying solution for game dev studios. As ALT Systems president Jon Guess laughingly explained, it provides clients “one neck to wring” should things go wrong, rather than dev studios having to suss out hardware issues on their own. The first fruits of the partnership arrive this year in game developer-centric versions of the aforementioned three workstation models. For a full rundown of the various workstation configurations that’ll arrive this year, ALT Systems has a site set up just for you.
Microsoft created its Windows 8 OS with touchscreen in mind, with a number of traditional PC users most likely groaning at the thought of reaching out to their monitor in order to open up a program. Mobile computers like laptops, ultrabooks and tablets seem to be making the best use of the new OS since their screen is within an easily reachable distance.
HP introduced its Envy X2 last August which is an 11.6” touch-screen slate PC that easily brings the portability of a tablet with the productivity of a light laptop when it’s connected to its keyboard dock. When we originally put our hands all over it, we walked away extremely impressed, but we knew we had to get this thing into our review lab to put it through all of our tests to see just how good it is. (more…)
Typical attempts at a glasses-free 3D display have trouble with viewing angles; we’re all too familiar with having to sit in a sweet spot to get the effect. HP Labs might have just solved this last problem with a prototype 3D LCD that would better accommodate the real world. The display’s backlight has nanopatterned grooves that send blue, green and red in multiple directions, letting the LCD show only the light that would be seen from a given viewpoint. Those positions are set in stone, but they’re both abundant (200 for photos, 64 for video) and can spread across a wide 180-degree viewing arc. At a thickness of as little as half a millimeter, a production LCD could easily be thin enough for a mobile device, too. The catch isn’t so much the screen as the content. Producers need an image for every possible viewpoint, which could create a fair share of logistical problems: even though footage wouldn’t necessarily require 200 cameras, it could limit fully immersive 3D to computer-generated visuals or else consume a massive amount of bandwidth. If those are the biggest barriers, though, we’re still that much closer to the holographic smartphone we’ve always wanted.
If Chromebooks from Acer, HP and Samsung have struck your fancy but haven’t been available in your country, your fortune might have just changed. Google’s proclaimed that Chrome OS laptops from the trio will see begin rolling out to folks in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. Not only is Mountain View expanding its laptop initiative’s international horizons, but it’s bringing them to more than 1,000 Best Buy stores too, roughly 500 more than previously carried them. Ready to snatch one of the notebooks? Hit the source links to get crackin’.
As ubiquitous as wireless printing has become, there remains the occasional hoop to jump through for printing from mobile devices if you don’t happen to have either a special app or iOS gear that supports AirPrint. HP and Samsung are teaming up to remove many of the headaches for the Galaxy S 4: when the phone launches in April, it should have setup-free WiFi printing to almost 200 HP inkjets and LaserJets, as long as any given printer is either on the same network or is otherwise accessible through direct printing. Don’t expect ubiquitous support, though. Beyond being limited to the one phone, you’ll have to stick to some of its preloaded apps, including the browser, contacts, email client, photo gallery, Polaris Office and S Note. It’s far from a truly universal solution, then, but the two partners are at least promising zero-setup printing on both the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II through firmware updates coming later in 2013. We’ll take the approach if it saves time snagging an old-fashioned boarding pass or some concert tickets.
Printing a document from your mobile device could be more of a hassle than its worth as the majority of us don’t even know what the first step would be in order to make such a magical operation occur. 3rd-party applications may work, but they often require dedicated applications to be used, which certainly doesn’t make the process seamless by any means. HP is looking to make the process as painless as possible now that it’s partnering up with Samsung’s Galaxy S4.
HP has teamed up with Samsung in order to deliver an easier and more efficient way of printing documents from your mobile device with a built-in mobile print technology inside of the Galaxy S4 that will make it possible to print documents to most HP inkjet and LaserJet network printers. Best of all, there won’t be any need for any dedicated applications to be downloaded. Galaxy S4 users will be able to print directly from the device’s email client, photo gallery and brewer applications as those applications will have the HP printing function built into them.
It’s not every day you hear of a smartphone technology getting its own massive 22,000 word, 55-page write up. But that’s just what’s been announced this week as the article known as “Palm: I’m Ready to Wallow Now” is offered up on the back of the decades-long history of the operating system. Writer Thom Holwerda speaks of the death of the mobile operating system and the long – surprisingly long – life it had before its demise.
The history of Palm, as Holwerda tells it, begins before the company was created. Back when one of the several co-founders Jeff Hawkins learned about handwriting recognition and studied it well before the birth of the first Palm Pilot. He even goes back to the 1960s to see the RAND Corporation’s showing of the GRAIL Project and the creation of the RAND tablet. Have a peek at a demonstration video of the Rand tablet with Alan Kay from back in those fabulously exciting times here:
From there – and from several other sources, of course – handwriting recognition was born into the public conscious. From there, 6,000 words later, Holwerda begins what ends up speaking one of several times about the reader. It’s interesting how – since this text is based online in a blog-centric environment – Holwerda makes it clear that the article is long. Extremely, massively long. He makes guide points throughout the body of the text to make sure the reader understands where they are – what a world we live in!
Holwerda goes on to speak on how the Palm V came to be, how the hardware in the Palm collection came to influence the smartphone world and how Palm’s webOS mobile operating system was eventually pushed to the Smartphone. It becomes clear how Palm went down a road where they could have been great – a chart included above shows what his view was and is on how Palm’s approach with mobile could have taken on iOS and Apple in the sweet spot between too few features and too many features – Android going down that tunnel, too.
And There’s the death of Palm and webOS, complete with the “wallowing” promised in the title of the piece. Truly astounding is the read that’ll have you either gripping your kneecaps in anticipation of a new page or crashing and falling asleep at every turn. Do you want to know everything there is to know about Palm? You’re in luck – it’s just been written.
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