Looks like buttonless is in this season.
No, not on this spring’s selection of evening wear. We’re talking about renderings of HP’s rumored webOS-powered tablet published this week on Engadget. It’s a sleek, all-black rendition of what we may be seeing from HP soon, and like the soon to be debuted Motorola Xoom, the tablet has got a button-free face.
While the pictures, leaked by an anonymous Engadget source, aren’t the most detailed, there are a few new things we can glean from taking a look. The finish on the back of the all-black tablet is slick-looking, differentiated from the rubberized backing you might find on, say, the new Galaxy Tab 4G. There’s a mini USB port at the bottom of the tablet along with front-facing camera, both found in many of this year’s forthcoming tablets. Two speakers appear to be on the left side and one on the right, a configuration which adapts to stereo listening in both portrait and landscape orientations. And of course, Palm’s webOS is running on the mystery tablet’s screen.
While HP is rumored to have both a 7-inch and 9-inch tablet in the works — codenames “Opal” and “Topaz,” respectively — the pictures we saw were of Topaz. Engadget has posted additional details on the HP tablets, reporting that they will be bundled with a cloud-based storage service, HP’s “Beats” audio processing, and a “tap to share” feature for transferring URLs, documents and music between the tablet and a phone simply by tapping them together.
When are we going to see these bad boys? An exact date remains to be seen, although the leaked Palm marketing materials suggest both a Wi-Fi and AT&T 3G version of the 7-inch Opal to ship in North America, Europe and China in September of this year. The sheet also lists a 4G Verizon-carried Opal to ship in September, and a 4G AT&T-carried version to come in July of 2012.
HP did not comment on the rumors.
Separate reports have emerged suggesting we could see the 9-inch tablet even sooner. HP will begin shipping Topaz units as early as March, according to sources who told DigiTimes. HP expects to ship somewhere between 45 to 48 million notebooks in 2011, with the webOS-operated tablets being the lion’s share of those numbers.
Before HP acquired Palm last April for $1.2 billion, Palm had tried to reinvigorate its ailing mobile market with webOS-based smartphones like the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi. Since Palm’s acquisition, HP has been trying to move the much-lauded webOS over to HP products like the ill-fated HP Slate.
A September release for HP’s Opal would put HP behind the forthcoming tablet debuts from Motorola, Lenovo and a potential iPad 2 release. But a staggered approach with Topaz’s March shipping date could keep HP up to speed with its competitors, and keep us puzzled with yet another tablet to choose from in the spring.
Photo: webOS interface/HP
See Also:
