HP is hoping to make a big splash in the slate market. There have been rumors and announcements about various different HP slates in design or development, running on all the various mobile operating systems on the market. According to All Things Digital, it looks they may have spread themselves too thin. Sources within HP are reporting that the HP slate being designed to run on Android has officially been delayed until an as of yet undecided timeframe next year. The device was supposed to hit the market in Q4 2010.
There hasn’t been an official announcement from HP yet as to why the delay is happening, but there are many potential reasons why HP could be doing this. After the successful acquisition of Palm and its WebOS operating system earlier this year, HP could be focusing their efforts on leveraging that IP and producing a positive financial result sooner rather than later. With the continued development of devices running operating systems from the big three OS developers – Micorsoft, Google, and now HP – it would make sense to have them not all release at the same time.
HP plans to take WebOS very seriously, according to CFO Jim Burns.
“We’re going to increase [R&D spending on webOS], and we’re going to increase sales and marketing as well. We’re going to take this platform, which today exists for smartphones only, and make it much broader than that.”