The Hewlett-Packard HPQ -2.56% brand may still be commonplace in homes and offices, but it can’t be described as particularly desirable. That’s starting to change, however, not least with this morning’s announcement of two genuinely enticing hybrid tablets: the 13-inch Split x2 (above) and the 10-inch SlateBook x2 (below).
The larger device costs $800 and doubles up as an over-sized touchscreen tablet and as a regular laptop, running full-blown Windows 8 on an Intel INTC +1.51% Core i3 processor. The smaller SlateBook works in much the same way, but uses a mobile-class processor running Google GOOG +3.26%‘s Android operating system in order to cut down on weight and cost, resulting in a price of $480.
Crucially, both tablets come with their keyboard docks included in the price. This fact, alongside HP’s reputation for build quality, should help them to stand out amid the clamor of rival hybrids from the likes of Samsung, Lenovo, ASUS and Acer , which often charge a heavy whack for keyboard add-ons. Even the flimsy keyboard covers forMicrosoft MSFT +0.94%‘s Surface tablets cost at least $120 extra.
More fundamentally, today’s double launch reflects a PC maker that is beginning to find a foothold on the slippery ledge known as mobile computing. Having given up on the dream of building its own mobile ecosystem (a fantasy which led to it squander $1.2 billion on Palm and WebOS in 2010), HP needsthese latest products to sell, and that urgency is happily apparent in the their pricing and design.
There are other bargains around, of course, including Dell’s suddenly-discounted XPS 10 hybrid at $350. But the devil is in the detail: how a dock is built, how it grips to the tablet, and what extra functions it brings. These things aren’t easy to get right, but HP seems to be moving in a sensible direction.
Instead of skimping on the keyboard and hinge mechanism for the sake of reducing weight (case in point: Lenovo’s ThinkPad Tablet 2), HP has gone in the opposite direction by pairing a lightweight tablet component with an unashamedly heavy dock that is geared towards productivity.
The total weight of the Split x2 with its keyboard is nearly five pounds — double the heft of the Surface Pro. However, the dock has a lot going for it, on top of its general rigidity: extra ports (including HDMI and USB 3.0), an SD card expansion slot, a 500GB hard drive to complement the fast solid state drive within the tablet itself, and a second battery to increase running time. This makes the Split x2 a threat not so much to Surface Pro, but to the hordes of mainstream Windows laptops that aren’t hybrids, or that don’t even yet have touchscreens.
Meanwhile, the little SlateBook x2 is much lighter, tipping the scales at a very manageable 2.8 pounds with the keyboard attached — and that dock comes with a second battery too. Its weight and price point make it a worthy counterpoint to the more expensive Surface RT ($620 with keyboard cover), especially since Android can do anything Windows RT can do — even running full Microsoft Office by way of remote desktop apps.
In many ways, the SlateBook x2 is exactly the type of product Microsoft doesn’t want to see on shelves next to Windows RT-based tablets — whether its the Surface RT or an OEM effort, such as ASUS’s VivoTab RT ($600 with dock). Not only is the HP model cheaper, but it benefits from specs that those RT devices can’t come close to matching — such as a next-gen NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor (versus Tegra 3) and a high-res 1,920 x 1,200 display (instead of 1,366 x 768).
This bang-for-buck potency is itself a sign that HP is becoming more relevant, and if the company can use its retail clout to bring its devices to market quickly (or at least, more quickly than Microsoft seems able to do), then a significant transformation may not be far off.
No comments:
Post a Comment