Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/24/hp_launches_boring_android_tablet/
Fondling again: HP slates new tablet for April
Seven-inch Jelly Bean with Google goodies
Posted in Tablets, 24th February 2013 22:31 GMT
Free whitepaper – Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement
HP has used Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as the stage to launch into the Android tablet market, with the new Slate7, a 7-inch unit based on Android Jelly Bean 4.1.
Shipping from the mobility unit headed [1] by ex-Nokia executive Alberto Torres, who joined HP last year, the Slate7 will arrive in April (which previous experience hints means it’ll be cancelled in May and will cost $49 by June).
It’s HP’s first foray outside of the Windows tablet world since it created an accidental [2] hit in the TouchPad, which became a cult classic after the company cancelled the product six weeks into its life and cut the price to $AUD99.
The middle-spec tablet ships at $US169, with a 1.6GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor, 1G RAM, a 1024x600 pixel display, Bluetooth and WiFi, 8GB of onboard storage plus a microSD slot, and front-and-back cameras (VGA on the front, 3.1 MP on the back).
The only particular differentiators the company highlighted – apart from price – are its Beats Audio speakers, and a native HP ePrint application that the company says supports native printing from “most applications”.
At 7” this device is keeping firmly at a distance from the 10” market dominated by Apple. In HP’s announcement [3], Torres provided a slim hint that other form factors are on the drawing board. ®