Hasta La Gadget!

HP’s Pavilion dm1 has done an awfully great job of living in the shadows, but it’s just about time this 11.6-inch ultranote finally peek its head out to do battle with Gateway’s LT32 and the host of others slotted between netbook and ultraportable. At long last, the style-centered dm1z is up for sale, touting space for 5GB of DDR3 RAM, a 250GB hard drive (or a 128GB SSD), a 92 percent full-size keyboard, optional external DVD burner, a 6-cell battery good for up to 5.25 hours of usage, VGA webcam, three USB sockets, a 5-in-1 card reader and a 64-bit copy of Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional. On the CPU front, it’s AMD’s Athlon II Neo running the show, with a variety of choices ranging from 1.3GHz (K325) to 1.7GHz (K125); there’s also an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225 GPU, 1,366 x 768 resolution panel, 802.11n WiFi, optional WWAN and a total weight of just 3.24 pounds. The whole shebang gets going at just $449.99, but don’t be shocked at how easy it is to push this cutie beyond six or seven Benjamins.

HP’s 11.6-inch Pavilion dm1 goes on sale originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Interesting post by our friend Harry McCracken at Technologizer today, pointing out that HP’s gone dead silent about the Slate ever since it announced plans to acquire Palm. Harry was at The Big Money’s Untethered conference today, and HP CTO Phil McKinney was on stage, where he “talked about the downsides of using existing operating systems for new types of devices” and “extolled the virtues of webOS.” Interesting topic, since the Slate very prominently ran Windows 7. When pressed, Phil said he couldn’t talk about unreleased products, which is a big change: it’s been six months since Steve Ballmer first showed the Slate at CES, and since then HP’s produced several rah-rah videos, one of them featuring none other than Phil McKinney himself.

Harry takes this new silence to mean that the HP Slate is dead, and we’re beginning to think he’s right: although we haven’t heard anything concrete, we definitely noticed HP’s absence at tablet-heavy Computex, and at this rate, the Slate’s rumored 1.6GHz Atom Z530 will be hopelessly out of date by the time it launches — Intel’s now showing off Moorestown Atom Z600 tablets and it’s got the Windows-tablet focused Oak Trail Atom planned for early next year. The window’s closing a little more with every passing day — at this point, HP needs to come clean just so we can all move on to waiting for the Hurricane.

What’s going on with the HP Slate? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HP CEO Mark Hurd certainly caused a few sad faces yesterday when he told investors and analysts that HP “didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business,” and now the company is trying to walk that back a little — rest easy, folks, because there are definitely more webOS smartphones on the way. Apparently what Hurd was really trying to say was that HP is excited about using webOS as the foundation for all types of smaller web-connected devices, and smartphones are just a part of that universe — a part HP intends to pursue. Phew. Now, can we see these new webOS devices, please? Here’s the full statement from HP:

When we look at the market, we see an array of interconnected devices, including tablets, printers, and of course, smartphones. We believe webOS can become the backbone for many of HP’s small form factor devices, and we expect to expand webOS’s footprint beyond just the smartphone market, all while leveraging our financial strength, scale, and global reach to grow in smartphones.

HP says it’s in the smartphone market, after all originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HP isn’t being shy about spending cash and taking big steps to reinvent itself lately: it just spent $1.2b on Palm in order to strengthen its consumer device portfolio, and now it’s announcing another billion-dollar outlay designed to streamline its enterprise services business and fully consolidate its $12.5b acquisition of EDS. Part of the process will involve laying off some 9,000 workers over several years as HP moves to automate more and more of its data centers and integrate more of EDS, but the company is planning to add some 6,000 jobs in different areas over the same period of time, so the hurt isn’t too bad. Taken together with the Palm acquisition, this means that both HP’s enterprise and consumer divisions will undergo some radical changes in the next few months — we’ll see how things pan out.

HP cutting 9,000 jobs during billion dollar enterprise services restructuring originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We joked about HP printers running webOS almost the second we learned about the Palm acquisition, but it turns out that’s actually part of the plan: HP CEO Mark Hurd told analysts that webOS would hit a “variety of form factors, including slates and web-connected printers” on the company’s Q2 financial results call today. webOS tablets were obviously a no-brainer, but printers are slightly more intriguing, in a way: while we’re not overly surprised HP wants to leverage webOS on its line of advanced touchscreen printers, we’re very curious to see what that actually looks like in practice — a printer with Synergy-level Facebook integration for easy photo printing? A printer that can play 3D games like Need for Speed? A printer that can… multitask? The possibilities are amusingly endless, if you think about it — and HP’s printing and imaging division is a $6.4 billion dollar business, so the money and motivation to push this idea into strange new places are certainly there. Speaking of money, HP’s doing just well on that front in general: profits were up 25 percent this quarter to $2.9 billion on total revenues of $30 billion, so yeah — Palm certainly has the money and resources it’s desperately needed. Now it just needs some new products and sharper execution.

HP says webOS coming to slates and web-connected printers originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 May 2010 18:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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