According to reports, Hewlett-Packard, which has recently acquired struggling smartphone maker Palm Inc., is thinking of using Palm’s webOS in the upcoming HP Slate tablet instead of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system.
Tech Herald quotes an insider who said that HP thinks that Windows 7 operating system draws too much power from the Slate’s modest Atom processor. The computer heavyweight is likely to drop Atom processor soon.
The use of the newly acquired webOS platform will also help HP to sell its Slate at a more competitive price, while the company will have to spend money on licensing Microsoft’s software, which would increase the cost of the device.
Earlier, HP had announced to sell the Slate for a starting price of $549, $50 more than the basic Apple iPad, which is lauded by many as an affordable tablet-computing platform. Meanwhile, Slate has failed to impress the experts who said that it is similar to a repackaged Netbook due to its 1.6GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 8.9-inch touchscreen, and battery back up of only five hours.
HP had acquired Palm on April 28, paying $1.2 billion and the acquisition is seen as a bid by the company to find its place in a market dominated by Apple’s iPhone and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices. Tech Herald reported that the revised version of the Slate tablet will arrive in the market during the latter part of this year.
