Following on the Tiger Woods-scale media frenzy surrounding the launch of the Apple (APPL) iPad, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has provided some details about its tablet device, which is to be called Slate. The venerable Silicon Valley company has said that Slate “delivers a holistic mobile experience”, whatever that is.
Tech web site Gizmodo claims to have a slide from HP’s internal presentation on the Slate. With WiFi capability and 64 gigabytes of storage, Slate is projected to cost about $600, or $100 less than a similarly equipped iPad. At the low end, though, Slate’s device will cost more, $549, compared with the low-end iPad’s price of $499. The low-end Slate comes with 32 gigabytes of storage, though, compared with just 16 gigabytes in the iPad.
Slate will also include two cameras, one pointed at the user, intended to be used for video teleconferencing, and another on the back to take photos with. Unfortunately for HP, Slate’s battery life is rated a just “five plus” hours, compared with “up to 10” on the iPad. The iPad may also have double the internal memory of the Slate, but that estimate is based on tearing apart an iPad because Apple hasn’t commented on the device’s memory capacity.
Technical details aside for the moment, one wonders if going head-to-head with Apple, or for that matter Amazon (AMZN) and its Kindle reader, is a good strategy for HP.
The iPad, with its large, beautiful screen, has radically changed the target audience for tablet devices. Microsoft
(MSFT) has tried several times to kick out a tablet device aimed at a business audience that would use the device on the sales floor and in the warehouse. That just never caught on.
Apple’s innovation was not so much the iPad hardware as it was the soft strategy that the iPad embodies. It extends the space carved out by the Kindle to include the entire web as a potential source of revenue for content creators. The Kindle appeals to readers — the iPad appeals to grazers, people who want to experience a wide variety of offerings that are entertaining and engaging (games, videos, movies, TV shows) as well. Rather than force a user to engage actively, as a laptop does, the iPad offers users a more passive, TV-like approach.
Experienced computer users are unlikely to grasp the full value of that strategy, but younger users raised with full access to the web could view tablet devices as defined by the iPad as the newer, better version of the television which changed people’s lives and habits more than 50 years ago.
If the tablet is the most recent incarnation of television, then HP can’t afford to let Apple open to much of lead. The sheer potential size of the market forces HP to make a play.
Acer, which introduced a tablet device more than three years ago only to see it fail, has said it won’t join the race started by the iPad. Dell Computer (DELL) has a Google (GOOG) Android powered device called the Streak which it plans to launch into the tablet market, but the device’s screen is less than half the size of the iPad’s. The Streak is really just a larger smartphone.
On the face of it, HP appears to introducing a me-too tablet device, but the company clearly sees an opening to be no worse than the number two player in a potentially vast market. The company is taking a chance, but it’s the right chance.
