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They say "you can't teach an old dog new tricks," and that certainly seems to be the case for Hewlett-Packard, now 72 years old, which announced Thursday it will reenter the tablet market after failure of its TouchPad and try again with the Slate 2.
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The 8.9-inch multi-touchscreen tablet, which will run Windows 7 at launch, features an Intel Atom Z670 CPU, 32 GB of storage, a 3-megapixel back camera and a front-facing VGA camera. The tablet starts at $699, and is expected to be released later in November.
If the description of the Slate 2 sounds familiar, it's because this tablet has many of the same features as its predecessor, the Slate 500, which Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP released in October 2010. That tablet, which ran Windows 7 and sold for $799, also had an 8.9-inch screen, a 3-megapixel camera on the back and a VGA camera on the front.
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With few improvements over the last model, a high price tag and a middle-of-the-road operating system, HP's Slate 2 is nothing close to a winner. If anything, it just shows that the company is still soul searching.
On Aug. 19, HP's then-CEO Leo Apotheker shocked employees and consumers alike when he announced the company would discontinue production of its TouchPad tablets and halt all WebOS operations in general. He also said HP would spin off its PC business.
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"The tablet effect is real and sales of the TouchPad are not meeting our expectations," Apotheker said. "The velocity of change in the personal device marketplace continues to increase as the competitive landscape is growing increasingly more complex, especially around the personal computing arena. The tablet effect is real."
He should've called it "the iPad effect." A study released by Informa Telecoms & Media estimates that Apple owns roughly 75 percent of the tablet market, while Microsoft's Windows 7 platform accounts for about five percent. HP's newest offering also does nothing to compete with the dominant iPad; if HP were smart, it would have waited a few months to platform Windows 8. Not only is the Slate 2 more expensive than Apple's tablet, but it's far less powerful, intuitive and attractive.
After being introduced in September, HP's new CEO Meg Whitman announced Oct. 27 that the company "needs to be in the tablet business." However, by creating a lackluster product that runs on a soon-to-be-outdated operating system, HP will surely find itself back where it started, when furious Best Buy executives demanded HP take back their thousands of unsold tablets piling up in storage. If Whitman wanted HP to make a comeback in tablets, she should've taken more risks with design and pricing, instead of going safe and making a clone of last year's model.
The late Steve Jobs provides added insight as to why the Slate 2 won't succeed:
"A lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in and they're looking at this as the next PC. The hardware and the software are done by different companies, and they're talking about speeds and feeds just like they did with PCs," Jobs said at Apple's iPad 2 unveiling in March. "Our experience and every bone in our body says that this is not the right approach to this. That these are post-PC devices that need to be even easier to use than a PC, that need to be more intuitive than a PC, and where the software and hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC."
Since Whitman replaced Apotheker as CEO, HP executive chairman Ray Lane said, "We are at a critical moment and we need renewed leadership to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead."
Whitman may be a strong communicator and leader, but by reentering the tablet space with an offering barely improved over last year's unsuccessful model, one has to wonder: "What was she thinking?"
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