HP may resurrect TouchPad, head of PC business says

A spinoff of the Personal Systems Group (PSG) will bring the "best value" to HP shareholders for taxation and other reasons, PSG head Todd Bradley told Reuters in an interview.
"A standalone company could and will do what's most required to drive value for shareholders and partners," Bradley said.
HP stunned markets when it announced two weeks ago that it is considering shedding its PC business, part of a wrenching series of moves away from the consumer market that included killing its new tablet.
Selling the PC division to a rival such as Taiwan's Acer Inc, which acquired computer maker Gateway in 2007 or to China's Lenovo Group Ltd, which purchased IBM's PC division in 2004, is not a desirable alternative, Bradley said.
"I would just say that the numbers don't support that that strategy works," said Bradley, citing Acer reporting its first-ever quarterly loss last week.
HP has been struggling in the PC market -- a high-revenue but low-margin business -- as popular devices such as Apple Inc's iPad have lured consumers away.
Bradley is on a trip to China, Taiwan and South Korea to meet with employees, suppliers, government officials and media to convince them that HP's PC business will remain robust and committed to Asian markets.
"China's obviously a critically important market for HP as well as PSG," Bradley said.
Bradley said HP will increase investments in Shanghai, and over the next three years expand its Shanghai manufacturing base, consolidate six employee sites into one campus, and make Shanghai a regional headquarters in China for the PSG.
Bradley said the company could resurrect HP's short-lived TouchPad tablet computer, which was introduced on July 1 before being terminated only about six weeks later.
"Tablet computing is a segment of the market that's relevant, absolutely," Bradley said.
A standalone incarnation of HP's PC business would be a full-line computer maker including ultrathin and all-in-one PCs.
He said he is stressing that "regardless of what happens, we're the largest PC company in the world. We need everybody energized, and while this isn't business as usual, we need people to go out and sell products every day."
Suppliers to HP PCs will remain largely intact, although the company may renegotiate and redefine the relationships.
"Unwinding the integration that's taken place within HP will be enormous amounts of work and effort, justified by the return we think we'll be able to provide to our shareholders."
Nevertheless, he said, "we will be one of, if not the largest customers of all of our major suppliers, be it Samsung to LG to Microsoft to Intel."
The Palo Alto, California-based company is now exploring options for its WebOS software, which it acquired through the acquisition of Palm, of which Bradley is a former chief executive.
Bradley has said in the past that a number of companies had expressed interest in possibly using WebOS as an operating system, but he gave no further details on Tuesday, saying that he is not in China to announce or even negotiate anything regarding WebOS.
HP's board will meet in December to decide on the course to take with the PC business, although insiders assume the decision will be a spinoff.
Bradley said he expects to be chief executive of any such new company.
"My intention would be to lead it through this transaction...and if it's a standalone public company, to lead that," he said.

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HP TouchPad Ad Revenue Reaches Android Levels in 10 Days

While it appears that the HP TouchPad is now sold out completely (or so we’re lead to believe,) the cash flow has just begun – in ad form. It’s not HP who will be profiting in this little situation right here, but they can count on developers of apps making a pretty penny in the last week and a half to be reconsidering their move away from webOS in the wake of HP’s ditching of the hardware. As ad agency Jumptap, a group that works with mobile ads for both Android and webOS, amongst others, reports, in just the past 10 days the ad revenue of the TouchPad has nearly caught up with Android tablets.

Android tablets should by now be in their prime, right? Not especially. While nearly every manufacturer under the sun has indeed released an Android tablet of some sort, you’ve got to consider the fact that Honeycomb, Android’s tablet-specific OS, is less than a year old itself. Of course you don’t see the iPad’s numbers on here, but given the amount of apps currently available for the Android tablet-specific world of Honeycomb at the moment, the TouchPad had a pretty good chance of catching up pretty quick.
But this quick? Ten days and the TouchPad has a HIGHER tablet traffic share than Android did 10 days ago. Android remains on top here in this chart, but look at those gains! As our source James Kendrick of ZDNet notes, this chart shows traffic and not sales, but Jumptap assures us that the sales are certainly reflected in the end.
Now the next question is: what will happen to these numbers when the TouchPad has Android running reliably and eventually works with CyanogenMod 7?
We shall see!
[via ZDNet]

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HP TouchPad CyanogenMod 7 Build Initiated

If there’s one name synonymous with Android hacking in this crazy, crazy mobile world of ours, it’s Cyanogen – and today the worlds most notorious fire-sale-ridden tablet, the HP TouchPad, appears to be booting the best. But wait a second, doesn’t the HP TouchPad run webOS? Why, yes it does, but as the $99 sale of said tablet made the entirety of its stock go down to zero after HP announced they were canning their webOS hardware department, Android was a certain next step – and these days, one step after Android equals Cyanogen.

A lovely RootzWiki letter has been sent out by the CyanogenMod team today announcing that they’ve been hard at work creating a build of CyanogenMod 7 for the public for about a week now. That said, the team has released a video of the popular ROM running on a TouchPad without any touch capabilities at the moment. The reason the team is releasing a video of a boot sequence here is because they need several extra actual TouchPad units and are currently unable to locate any at the store, on the black market, on the streets, etcetera.



If you happen to have a TouchPad and would like to toss it on over to the CyanogenMod team, I’m sure they’d be more than willing to work with you on a deal. The team also wants to let the public know that they’re not working on a set schedule for this project AND that they’re not working for any sort of bounty (there was a $1500 USD bounty about a week ago for anyone who could get Android running on the TouchPad, fyi). They say they’d like to do it right, not fast.
Also note: this TouchPad is running Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread at the moment. The team at CyanogenMod have also made this project a special one in which they’ll be aiming for a multi-boot function which will allow booting into CyanogenMod7, webOS, and a variety of different operating systems concurrently. Cool beans!
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HP TouchPad Android 2.2.1 System Dump Files Now Available

The HP TouchPad has been getting a lot of attention as of late from the entire developer and Android communities. Once the TouchPad price dropped to $99 everyone started running wild with the hopes and dreams of one day soon running Android on said device. Just a day or two later we learned that Android ports were already under way and a few days later one was spotted running Android 2.2.1 out of the box, right from Best Buy.

In case anyone isn’t following the TouchPad Android progress there is also a video clearly showing the HP TouchPad running on Android 2.2.1 FroYo and I’ll post that below. It appears to be a QuIC (Qualcomm Innovation Center) developer unit that somehow managed to get boxed up and sold at Best Buy. Lucky for the entire android world the user was nice enough to get a full system dump of all the files to help out.



Now exclusively over at RootzWiki the files are available for download and the port of Android 2.2, 2.3, and hopefully 3.2 Honeycomb can all get a little head start. We mentioned more on this here once before but the port will be called TouchDroid and the amount of support and developers keeps growing by the day. I have a feeling we will be seeing Android on the HP TouchPad sooner rather than later.
[via Android Police]

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Android 2.2.1 System Dump From HP TouchPad Now Available

The HP TouchPad has become quite a hot topic in the Android community as of late, thanks to its ultra-low price tag and superb hardware specs. Several dev teams have already stepped forward to announce plans to port Android to the device, while at least two devices have already been sold with developer builds of Android intact right out of the box.
One of the lucky owners of said Android-ified TouchPads, jiwanish, has been so kind as to provide a full system dump to RootzWiki, allowing devs to make some real progress on the Android TouchPad front. The build is Android 2.2.1, and is most definitely a test version from the Qualcomm Innovation Center, as it shows the logo upon bootup.

We should start to see some major advancements on the port at this point, especially considering the $2100 bounty that's on the line for whoever can provide a working port.

To download the system dump, head over to RootzWiki!

[Thanks, Nico!]

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Samsung could be preparing to purchase HP’s PC business

Korea-based notebook brand vendor Samsung Electronics has reportedly contacted Taiwan-based notebook makers Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics and Pegatron Technology in August to evaluate the possibility of outsourcing notebook orders, according to sources from upstream supply chain, which added that there might be a result soon and Samsung may outsource a small volume of orders to these players.

The sources added that Samsung's actions seem like it is already in preparation to take up Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) PC business.

The sources pointed out that Samsung's notebooks are all manufactured at its plants in China, although the company had made contacted Taiwan-based notebook makers several times about outsourcing orders before, there was no result. However, Samsung, earlier this month, invited Quanta, Compal and Pegatron to its headquarters in South Korea with a rather cautious attitude, which the sources believe was an indication that Samsung might be already in preparation for expanding its business.

The sources pointed that the Taiwan's notebook OEM industry's production efficiency and cost control is currently unmatched worldwide; therefore, if Samsung takes over HP's PC department, HP's over 40 million PC shipment volume will still need to depend on Taiwan OEMs. However, related suppliers of components such as panel, memory and battery may be affected as Samsung has a rather strong vertical integration supply chain.

Within HP's 40 million units of PC orders in 2011, Quanta will ship 20 million units with Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) to ship eight million units, Inventec, seven million units, Wistron, 3-4 million units and Compal, two million units.

The sources pointed out that if HP's PC business is sold to other brand players, makers such as Quanta, Foxconn and Inventec are expected to see the most impact as they have higher order proportions with HP, while Wistron and Compal are expected to benefit.

Commenting on the event, Quanta pointed out that since the information is still limited, the company can only monitor the outcome carefully; however, since the new PC orders from HP for 2012 are all already set, it is unlikely to have significant changes. However, if Samsung takes down HP's 40 million units of PC shipments and with Samsung's own 10 million units, the company will need to ship 50-60 million units totally in one year and will definitely need to find OEM partners as Samsung itself may have difficulty to make all these orders, Quanta noted.

However, Quanta will continue to work on cloud computing and the related products in the future to increase its non-notebook business' contribution.

Meanwhile, Inventec pointed out that HP's announcement seems like is for testing the market's reaction and believes that whether HP will sell the business will still depend on the market's feedbacks. In addition, since HP is given up its PC business because of the weak profitability of consumer notebooks, Inventec, which is manufacturing mainly HP's enterprise notebooks, expects to only see a limited impact from the event.

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HP TouchPad Getting Android 2.3 Gingerbread Port This Week?

The HP TouchPad was the extremely popular webOS tablet from HP this year right? No not really, but once HP announced that they were retiring the brand and they’d no longer continue with the TouchPad series it quickly because the hottest selling tablet I’ve seen in a while. Now that the HP TouchPad is extremely affordable at only $99 for the 16GB and $149 for the 32GB (if you can find them in stock anywhere let us know) they are now attracting tons of attention. Users everywhere are snagging them up hoping to soon run Android on the dual-core tablet.

Yesterday we mentioned that a few developers have already started porting Android to the TouchPad and are calling it TouchDroid but now today we have even better news. New details are coming out from a YouTube video where one user is claiming to already have Android 2.3 Gingerbread running on the TouchPad and will unveil full details and instructions on August 24th, that is in two days on this Wednesday. Here is that video teaser below.


While that is only a teaser we also have a second video to show you today. This is Android 2.2 FroYo pre-installed running on the HP TouchPad instead of webOS. We don’t have a lot of details on this next video the sources are claiming it came out of the box with a ubuntu build and was in fact booting to Android 2.2 stock. That is extremely interesting and a bit odd to say the least.


Looking at that video it appears to still have the plastic on the device. It is running on Android 2.2.1 FroYo and at first boot we see the Qualcomm Innovation Center boot logo, also known as QuIC. These two videos are definitely causing a stir in the Android developer community and is peaking my interest to say the least. While I’ve still not bought one I did try to snag one at a few online retailers that accepted my hard earned dollars but they quickly returned it and said they were out of stock. Sound familiar anyone?
Hopefully we see more details in the next day or two regarding either of these videos as the entire HP TouchPad and Android news continues to climb. Stay tuned for more details.
[via Phandroid]

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HP TouchPad Android Ports Already Under Way

I must say for $99 crisp dollar bills, the HP TouchPad rocking Android would be a pretty awesome deal. That would be a great price for a tablet and once we get some Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich running on it everyone will be glad they snagged one for $99 dollars. After HP discontinued the TouchPad it went on a firesale and is now in the bargain bin. The specs compare to that of the HTC Sensation with that 1.2 Ghz dual-core Qualcomm processor, but with a 9.7″ 1024×768 IPS display. All that running Android sounds like something I’d be okay with.

An Android port for the TouchPad has already started and is picking up huge traction over the last 24-48 hours. With it now selling for $99 or $149 at HP.com we now have a game of “The Price is Right” and all we need is the Android OS. Over at RootzWiki the project has about 90 pages of interest after a day and a half, they are calling it TouchDroid. While some reports have claimed the hardware was to blame and not the webOS we all are still left wondering. Once we get Android 2.3 Gingerbread, CM7, and eventually Honeycomb running on this thing we’ll really know for sure.
While almost everything that has hit the market as of late has had a few geeks trying to port Android over, the TouchPad is in a much better position because so many have it and that price is just so stellar. I’m sure somewhere there is already a bit of progress on a full port, but the team at RootzWiki has a nice group of four developers and this is only the beginning. I’m sure once a few webOS developers that also love Android get around to talking with them things should start to move along a bit quicker. This wont be an easy task and the devs have plenty of work cut out for them. Be nice, be patient and feel free to head over to RootzWiki and show your support. (Thanks oGsSTC)
$99 dollar Android 3.2 Honeycomb TouchDroid Tablet — Put me down for two!

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7-inch HP TouchPad Go leaked with 1.5GHz processor

HP’s TouchPad Go was recently approved by the the Federal Communications Commission, which revealed some information on the unannounced tablet. The webOS device could be equipped with a dual-core 1.5GHz processor and a 3G radio, which would indicate HP is looking to launch it with at least one U.S. carrier. We first heard word of a 7-inch TouchPad tablet in January of this year and the most recent rumors revealed that HP could launch the device this month. It is possible we’ll hear more about the TouchPad Go in the coming days, and we hope it gains more consumer traction than the original TouchPad, which just had its priced slash by $100 to make it more appealing.
Read

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