Another day another rumor, Arrington over at techcrunch is restating a rumor heard over at Crunchgear a few months ago about HP changing the O/S of their Windows 7 tablet the HP Slate.
We first saw the HP Slate at CES in the hands of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer which doesn’t seem to support this rumor. Arringtons source tells him that HP is not satisfied with Windows 7 as a tablet operating system and has terminated the project.
To follow up this rumor form a few months ago he goes on to say that HP may also be abandoning Intel-based hardware for its slate lineup simply because it’s too power hungry. Which would also rule out Windows 7 as an operating system. Personally I was very excited about the slate, but the chipset & O/S + the 1GB of RAM had me wanting more out of the slate. I mean 6Hr of battery life, why bother when the iPad is your main competitor!
So what will HP use as an operating system? Since HP now has Palm in its pocket the new rumor is the Palm WebOS. They said how important it was to them yesterday, and they will likely experiment with porting it to a slate-type device.
But I think this will stay in the realm of rumor. My money is on Android over Palm, even though HP have newly acquired Palm, Android has its marketplace. Though Palm seemed to innovate with the UI of the Pre it never really gained adoption the way we all hoped. Plus if HP were to launch their own O/S, further increasing market fragmentation, do you think the app developers are going to be flocking over to yet another single device/manufacturer O/S where there is no money to be made? My money is no way! Android would be the safer bet, so the Web OS rumor I think should be put to bed.
If you want to reminisce about the HP Slate here is a video below.
