Hewlett-Packard has killed off its considerably ballyhooed Windows 7 tablet pc,
Office Home And Business 2010, says a resource who’s been briefed on the matter.
The device was first unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES 2010 in January and was supposed to hit the market in mid 2010. But our source tells us that HP is not satisfied with Windows seven as a tablet operating system and has terminated the project (something CrunchGear mentioned months ago).
HP may also be abandoning Intel-based hardware for its slate lineup simply because it’s too power hungry. That would also rule out Windows seven as an operating system.
So what will HP use as an operating system? Look for Google-powered devices,
Office Professional 2010 Sale, which have already been announced. And HP really does seem determined to make a go of the Palm WebOS. They said how important it was to them yesterday,
Genuine Windows 7 Professional,
Get Windows Media Player - Microsoft Windows, and they will likely experiment with porting it to a slate-type device.
Will WebOS emerge as a successful operating system for tablet devices? That seems very unlikely given the dominance of the closed Apple OS and the likely success of the open Android and Chrome operating systems from Google. To get traction from third party developers with WebOS HP will need to sell a lot of units. And it’s not clear what they’d gain from all that effort,
Microsoft Office 2010 Serial, anyway. HP knows how to build and sell hardware,
Microsoft Office 2007, not operating systems.
We’ve reached out to HP for comment. Here’s the video promoting the HP Windows tablet from January: