Submitted by “Having failed to carve out a place for itself in the post-PC era, Hewlett-Packard is now taking drastic measures – by adopting Google’s Android operating system to run a series of upcoming mobile devices. It’s a bit of a Hail Mary pass for HP, which has fallen years behind its rivals in the mobile space. It’s also a big win for Google, which adds another powerful partner to the Android ecosystem.” Ugh.
Please use stock Android
Instead, they could team up with Sailfish alliance for example. Or to do something else original.
Edited 2013-02-14 23:27 UTC
Why do that when there is a popular and well proven platform?
There is no point investing in a platform that has a question future and not a huge amount of momentum behind it.
Uhm, they just tried that, with WebOS. Didn’t end good for them.
And with Sailfish we might of course hope for the best – but better expect failfish…
Edited 2013-02-22 00:05 UTC
HP sold some printers with detachable Android tablets, before they bought palm.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/09/20/hps-first-and-last-android-t…
They also were working on android as an alternative to Webos on the touchpad.
http://phandroid.com/2011/08/22/android-2-2-found-pre-installed-on-…
They are soooooo screwed.
Should have grown a pair and stuck to webOS guns. Now they are all Has Been.
Hewlett-Packard used to be a big and proud company. Going with Android is not very original, doesn’t differentiate them from the overwhelming competition and turns them in to a me-too company.
Even though WebOS was bought and not an own product it is an excellent system and not Android/iOS/WP. It would be their own and they can take it in any direction they want. It would have their own logos all over it, now it comes with Android and Google stickers.
They are not going to make any money selling mobile phones or tablets with Android, only Samsung does that. If they use it for something else, like printer interfaces, they could have used any system, including WebOS.
HP has the recourses, money and people to be original and creative. If they go with the flow they’ll just drown in the market. Apple and Samsung have the higher end locked out and the middle to lower end has so many competitors that HP has no chance of getting a foothold, let alone make any money.
If they are contend with make little to no money they might as well take the gamble and go forward with WebOS and at least try to establish it as something different. Make sure they hardware is excellent, just like the software, and in time I’m sure they sell enough to make some sort of a profit and who knows if it’ll take off from there.
They did release the HP-15C Limited Edition last year, one of their best moves ever. Stopping production of the HP-15C was one of their worst of course.
http://hp15c.org/
My, my, what doom and gloom in this thread. While supplying Android based hardware isn’t particularly innovative and HP is late to the game, they still could make a killing. Do what Google doesn’t dare doing. Go full on Nexus with top of the line specs in the hardware.
People would like Google updated hardware, but the Google Nexus phone line is too conservative with specs to be killer. Google needs to keep the Samsung’s, HTC’s, Sony’s, LG’s, etc. happy. So the Nexus is a safe, not quite high end line.
HP could become a Nexus champion by bringing out hardware that can compete with the big “Android-with-annoying-skin” vendor’s hardware, but keep Android stock. I know I’d buy a Nexus HP Phone, if it measured up to the top of the line Galaxy, Experia and Optimus lines.
I’m not sure I agree with that. The Nexus S may not have been a breakthru device, but the Galaxy Nexus(720p, Dual core, no buttons) and Nexus 4(S4 pro, 2GB RAM) were top of the line specs when them came out. Sure there were phones that came out after with better specs, but compared to the phones out at the time(SII, Bionic/Atrix, Desire;SIII, OneX, RZR HD) the Nexii held there own. I don’t equate screen size to a better spec, and I will admit cameras have been weak.
For me it hasn’t been about screensize. I’m not particularly atracted to phablets. It’s been the relatively weak camera’s, the just less then top notch display technology used and the insistence on just 16GB internal storage and no SD cards.
I don’t mind Google taking 16 GB storage as its gold standard, but for me, that is too little. So no Google Nexus for me. I like my apps, I like my small video’s and I like my music and I can’t and I don’t want to store that in the Cloud and I’m not going to lug around extra USB storage.
In the Netherlands our data bundles went from incredibly cheap and nearly unlimited, to very limited and priced at a premium. So “Cloud” phones here are a very unattractive proposition economically.
I’d like an all out phone, no compromises, just the best that can be fitted at the 600 Pecunia mark, with no “flagship line phone with annoying skin” interfering with the specs. One has to wonder why the Galaxy Nexus was just slightly less of a phone than the Galaxy S2…
As the owner of an HP WebOS tablet and an HP Android tablet,(the Zeen, look it up) I hope the WebOS team is in charge. The zeen is heavily skinned with a slow, laggy widget only launcher, and many other changes. It comes with the “slideme” store, with almost no software. The Amazon app store was nice until they started blocking “incompatible” apps, and now it’s as bad as the slideme store. They did upgrade it from 2.1 to 2.2, well after 2.3 was out, but otherwise updates have been scarce. Hardware is actually nice considering the price and time it came out.
WebOS on the other hand, is beautiful and well thought out. My wife still likes using her Touchpad, I also have two with Android installed. I think HP really screwed up here, since the app problem could have been solved now that so many others are also using html apps.(BB, Firefox, Tizen, ect.)
Good luck on getting a no skinned version of Android. I’m usually against skins, but I think if done right HP could have something unique. Imagine Android 4.2 with a WebOS style launcher and gesture system, that could run all standard Android apps. As long as they didn’t change too much of the base system it could be easily upgraded to the latest Android version quickly.
Honestly I’m just relieved HP has come around and realized sticking with Windows on everything might not be the best bet. I look forward to what HP makes, but I’ll probably stick to my Nexus.
Aside printers and instrumentation, HP has never done much innovation. They have built run-of-the-mill PCs that ran Microsoft Windows, and run-of-the-mill PDAs that ran Microsoft Windows Pocket PC. They’ve only tried once to exit the trodden path, not by designing anything, but by buying Palm, with disastrous results for everybody involved.
So, now the go Android? I wish them well. They can make nice tablets in volume, that’s for sure, if they can offload the OS like they’ve (almost) always done.
Well, I wouldn’t mind it if HP built computers like they build scientist stuff.
HP calculators bring quite a lot of value for the money if you don’t mind going the outsider route, and I know of few pieces of computer hardware that are as predictable, well-documented, and easy to program as the average GPIB instrument.
Edited 2013-02-16 00:27 UTC
Sorry HP workstations are bloody good. I am writing this on one.
Consumer line != Business Line.
Some commenters here seem to subscribe to the idea that launching an Android device somehow precludes HP from being innovative or having plans for Web OS.
To me it looks like HP wants to avoid Nokia’s mistake of not launching Android phones, even after being publicly called out by carriers to do so. If HP sells what customers want to buy (namely, Android) then this is a sound business strategy. In fact, if HP intends to sell some niche Web OS devices later, it helps to already have a strong presence in mobile. Just like Samsung’s success in Android helps them flock Bada and soon Rex/Tizen.
There is nothing wrong with releasing a future device first with Android while providing the necessary code/hooks for dual-booting and/or migrating to the OpenWebOS project. After-all, most users want Apps and App developers want revenues so that the only realistic platform choices for now are Android and iOS.
The small number of available Apps was one of the major complaints when the TouchPad was initially released (the MSRP was another major one). Same story with the BlackBerry PlayBook although the slashing of the MSRP and the eventual release of an Android emulator/run-time engine as part of PB OS 2.0 have changed that perception.
Now, the problem with both platforms is to find one in a store…..
Anyways, corporate strategies do change as CEOs come and go. In a year or so it will be more evident where HP is headed – hopefully something as innovative and memorable as the HP10-HP15 line of calculators of the early 1980s.