Posts Tagged ‘HP’

Sure, brand names are a matter of taste and marketing. Who really liked the names “iPod” and “Wii” when they were revealed? It appears that HP’s name for its upcoming WebOS slate may fit right into a row of names that may raise some doubt: It appears that the name will be PalmPad, which isn’t quite the creative match for a product that comes out of $1.2 billion acquisition and carries the hopes of HP’s being able to compete with Apple’s iPad.

It took HP $1.2 billion to restart its smartphone business and save Palm. Don’t count on the existing Pre devices as they are already given away for a bargain. It’s WebOS HP wanted: The company confirmed new smartphones, tablets and netbook PCs and is telling developers to get to work.

Let’s imagine you are in charge at HP to decide who gets to envision and design the hardware around your new WebOS software. Whom would you choose? The notebook guys? The handheld crew? The consumer group?

HP today its ePrintCenter cloud printing platform which will be in every web-connected HP printer with a price tag of $100 or more. The company says it is first to provide personal printing capability that integrates with Google’s cloud applications.   Google Docs can be printed directly from the printed, without the need of a PC.

The United States kept its status as the world’s leading supercomputing power – by a thin margin – over China. Jaguar of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory remains the world’s most capable supercomputer in terms of sustained Linpack performance, but is trumped by China’s Nebulae system which has a theoretical peak performance of 3 PFlops.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) beat IBM in server revenues for the first time in the first quarter of the year, according to Gartner.

The original HP tablet running Windows 7 at the most recent CES tradeshow was based on Intel’s Atom processor. HP now appears to have killed that product and replaced it with a rumored product under development with Palm, which should be based on ARM. These days, HP is Intel’s and Microsoft’s biggest and strongest partner. HP’s decision to drop Windows 7 and Intel, a result of years of frustration, signifies a major shift in the personal computing market and could result in the first real competitor to the iPad. But, regardless of that, it showcases a clear choice for ARM and one of the problems that Intel is struggling to overcome with Atom.

As HP announced that it will acquire Palm, the company that has made handheld computing popular will be swallowed and is likely to largely disappear. Here are 20 of the most notable devices that were introduced over the past 14 years.

HP announced today that it is buying Palm for $1.2 billion. This is great news for Palm, who has been searching for a “white knight” to help it out of a severe sales decline. It has been rumored that many companies were potentially looking at acquiring Palm, including Lenovo, HTC, ZTE, Huawei, etc. But HP was a surprise suitor. Palm stockholders get $5.70 for each share of stock in a cash deal. This is easy for HP as it represents only about 1% of yearly revenues. HP could have waited a few months and likely paid less, given Palm’s shrinking installed base and sales. But likely there were others courting Palm and so HP had to react now or lose the acquisition.

Hewlett-Packard announced that it has agreed to purchase struggling handheld maker Palm for $5.70 per share of Palm common stock in cash or an enterprise value of approximately $1.2 billion.