Whispers
HP's eagerly anticipated TouchPad webOS tablet could launch in March if rumours are to be believed.
The DigiTimes reported that its sources said that HP's slate could hit the shops in April, according to whispers from ‘upstream content partners'.
It has previously been reported that HP's slate will launch in the summer, perhaps putting it at a disadvantage when competing against other tablets, especially those running Google's new Honeycomb OS.
HP reportedly aims to ship between 45 and 48 million PCs, 4 to 5 million of which it reckons will be tablets, according to the newspaper but HP has not commented on the rumours.
If the rumours prove true, HP's tablet effort could hit the market at the same time as Apple's iPad 2, which is also rumoured to be launched in March and be made available to consumers in April.
Apple sold an incredible 3 million of its original iPads within just 3 months of unveiling the tablet, which some people argue makes HP's rumoured target rather bullish considering it is entering an already crowded market, with established iOS and Android slates as well as the highly anticipated Honeycomb offerings set to launch soon.
As previously reported, the TouchPad marks HP's entry into the tablet market after much prevarication. Before the Palm acquisition HP was going to give good, old Windows a go on its ‘Slate', but the inability of Microsoft to produce something remotely competitive with Apple's iOS was probably a big factor in HP going shopping for its own mobile OS.
Among the unique features of the new webOS devices are ‘touch-to-share', which enables the sharing of URLs between devices by merely touching them together. There is, of course, an email/messaging/social networking hub, and it's worth noting that HP has gone with Qualcomm for the chip, where Palm had previously used the TI OMAP SoC. It's only a single core one, but HP seems to have clocked it up nicely.
