I took a quick peek at the new tablet that HP will release this summer. It’s the first one that looks like it could give the current iPad some competition. Hp’s purchase of Palm may be the best thing they have ever done. Blackberry also has the potential to make something decent, I’ll be interested in seeing what they come up with. I haven’t really been impressed with the motorola tablet, especially at the $800 price they want for it. I’m not so sure what is going to happen with the Android platform. There really hasn’t been a killer tablet announced with it yet. It looks like HP is going to get around one of the big problems that Android can’t seem to lick, different devices having different resolutions. Hp’s “resolution independence” looks like it could have some serious long-lasting effects. All of those folks have a lot of catching up to Apple when it comes to applications though. It isn’t clear how that will be accomplished. Hp might make a go at making their own OS across both their mobile and desktop machines. It might be their best bet seeing as how their long time OS partner is running things.
Speaking of which… One company that is inexplicably missing from all of this excitement is Microsoft. They are talking about having a windows version that can run on the popular ARM based tablets next year. That’s going to be way too little, too late. Everyone but them seems to understand that windows is not a good tablet OS. You’d think they would have caught on to this over the decade they have been making bad selling tablets. By all accounts, their new phone OS is pretty good and it would seem to be a natural platform to make a tablet OS. Instead, they are sticking to their windows 7 guns. I have been hearing about the death of Microsoft for a while, but I never really took it too seriously. But now, their inability to get into the tablet world, their grasping for desktop applications in an increasingly cloud based world, and general incompetence at everything that isn’t a gaming console makes me think I could see the end of them in my lifetime.