HP - page 5

In all the hubbub with HP killing the TouchPad and spinning off its PC division, one might forget that HP still has a strong connection with Apple: They’re the only printer manufacturer with printers that fully integrate prinitng from iOS, thanks to HP’s inclusion of AirPrint on many of its printers.

The HP Officejet 6500A Plus ($200), with its all-in-one features, automatic document feeder, wifi connectivity and removable duplexer for double-sided printing, is already an attractively spec’d printer. Toss in AirPrint capability and you’ve got a strong contender to fill any iDevice-toting home/small office manager’s priniting needs.

If you’re a regular visitor to Cult of Mac, you’ll already have some appreciation of how terrific Steve Jobs is. But do his employees share the same opinion of him as us fans?  Well, according to the employment reviews and rating site Glassdoor, 97% of them approved of him as CEO — making Steve one of the most successful CEOs among those rated on the site.

Reports about Best Buy and Walmart returning huge numbers of unsold TouchPad tablets to Hewlett Packard appear to be strikingly true.

Speaking on a conference call right after dropping the bombshell that HP is killing its webOS phones and tablets, HP CEO Leo Apotheker admitted that his company’s iPad competitor is not selling at all, despite hefty price cuts.

The company hoped the TouchPad would quickly establish itself as the number two to the iPad, Apotheker said, but it hasn’t made a dent at all.

Samsung’s in trouble. The Korean electronics giant is being sued by Apple in just about every market for copying Apple’s iOS, iPhone and iPad designs… and Apple’s winning. Worse, Samsung’s biggest mobile partner, Google, just bought out one of their main smartphone competitors, Motorola, for $12.5 billion. Now that Google has an Android hardware team in-house, how much longer will third-party smartphone makers like Samsung be given equal access to the Android operating system?

It’s a tight spot, and Samsung knows it’s in trouble. Samsung boss Lee Kun-Hee reacted to the news of Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobiity by telling top managers on Monday to “boost software prowess, patent pools and talent,” as well as seek out opportunities for mergers and acquisitions. Samsung — probably correctly — thinks this will be a quicker way to boost the prowess of their own in-house mobile OS, Bada.

Well, bada bing, bada boom, because a huge acquisition opportunity may have just presented itself. After a single round, HP just threw in the towel on webOS, a mobile operating system they purchased along with Palm back in 2010 for $1.2 billion.

We’re just spitballing here, but maybe Samsung should buy webOS and the Palm business out from under HP? Here’s why it could be a good move.

Woe be the mighty HP. Retail giant Best Buy wants the PC maker’s tablets off its shelves after selling just 25,000 TouchPads. That’s not all, Walmart and others are also having trouble getting rid of the devices, according to a Wednesday report. Say it with us: there’s no tablet market, only an iPad market.

Apple has come a long way since the 1970s. While the Mac was seen for years as a niche product that would never appeal to a mass audience, Apple has just been declared the third largest PC vendor in the US.

Apple went from fifth place to third this business quarter with a 10.7% stake in the US PC market.

The reviews of HP’s would-be iPad-killer are in, and they all agree on one thing: the HP Touchpad is no iPad, but webOS has a huge amount of promise.

Now an internal email sent out to HP staff has leaked, written by Palm’s Senior Vice President, and it compares webOS’s rough edges along with its promise to Mac OS X ten years ago.

Should tablets be classified alongside notebooks as Mobile PCs? HP has its fingers crossed and hopes no as the rising popularity of the iPad could see a new mobile PC king crowned in 2012.

HP will be releasing its own would-be iPad killer on Friday. Called the HP Touchpad, it’s the first tablet running webOS 3, the tablet-sized operating system HP picked up from Palm last year. But what is the critical consensus? Is the HP Touchpad a viable competitor to the iPad?

Across the board, the answer is no, but most critics agree that six months from now, webOS 3 — if not the Touchpad itself — could be a viable threat to iPad. Right now, though, the HP Touchpad is unpolished and messy.

Here’s the only review of the HP Touchpad you need, glommed together from the Internet’s gadget blogging hivemind.

Let’s put Apple’s golden touch in perspective, because it’s a super power eerie and miraculous enough that it makes competitors puke in mortal terror (hey, it happens!). Consider this: Apple makes more from selling one Mac than HP does from selling seven PCs.

To use a sporting metaphor, PC maker HP is ‘trash-talking’ about its chances to beat Apple’s iPad. Viewed in light of declining PC sales, HP is also whistling past the graveyard.

When he first showed off OS X Lion last year, Steve Jobs explained Apple’s reluctance to add multitouch displays to their line of iMacs by saying that multitouch needed to be horizontal to be pleasant to use. Use it in a vertical position and you’re always leaning forward to poke and prod the screen, leading to what Steve Jobs calls “gorilla arm.” That’s why Apple has only brought multitouch to the Mac through peripherals like the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. Even so, some patents have shown up over the past year that suggest that Apple’s been experimenting with multitouch-capable iMacs with pivoting displays that pull down to a more appropriate horizontal orientation when a user wants to interact with on-screen elements directly.

If you want to see what such an iMac might look like in the flesh, though, check out HO’s latest TouchSmart PC. Look familiar? Yup, that’s right: it features a pull-down design that drops the multitouch display into a horizontal position to reduce arm fatigue… just like in Apple’s patent!

Apple intends on using the 100 acres of land they purchased for $300 million from HP last month to build a partially domed, green-friendly campus with an intensive subterranean road and transportation network, according to a recent report by a Spanish paper… and they’ve already hired the visionary architect to make the futuristic, utopian campus city happen.

Yesterday, reports suggested that support for Apple’s AirPrint feature had been plucked from iOS 4.2 for shared printers connected to Macs and PCs, leaving only a subset of AirPrint-compatible HP printers mentioned in the official developer documentation.

Has Apple just had last minute compatibility problems they’re not willing to delay their iOS 4.2 update for, or has the AirPrint feature been canceled? Not according to Steve Jobs, but unfortunately, his comments on the matter aren’t particularly illuminating.

Apple’s put down webOS before in the smartphone wars, but you can’t keep a solid operating system down for the count: six months after HP acquired Palm, they have just announced webOS 2.0 and the Pre 2 smartphone.

Starting in November when iOS 4.2 drops, we’ll finally be able to print directly from the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad through AirPrint. At the beginning, AirPrint will mostly only work with printers shared on your network, but eventually, AirPrint-certified printers will appear that can sense nearby iOS devices out-of-the-book.

In the meantime, though, we’re going to have to settle for some printers kludging iOS printing… namely by assigning each printer an e-mail address to which documents can be sent for printing through your iPhone or iPad’s built-in Mail.app.

HP’s just announced three such printers: the HP Envy e-All-In-One, which will cost $249 and do the whole smorgasbord of home printing duties including printing, copying and scanning; the HP OfficeJet Pro 8500A Plus, an all-in-one office inkjet with wireless connectivity; and the HP PhotoSmart eStation, which costs $499 and is capable of printing photos of up to 9600×2400 dpi, and comes with an optional (blargh) Android tablet.

They’re all attractive printers, and they are all technically “AirPrint-compatible” in that when AirPrint rolls down the software update pipeline, they’ll at least be shareable from your Mac. If you want a truly AirPrint compatible printer, though, best wait for a spell longer.

HP soon intends to relaunch their Palm-acquired webOS mobile operating system with a major new version, which they intend to use in a new lineup of devices to compete directly with iOS devices like the iPad. One new addition to the webOS arsenal of software features is pretty head-scratching, though: according to leaked screenshots of the software beta, the next version of webOS will sport MobileMe integration.

Huh. We don’t get it. Sure, Palm has done its dance with Apple before, giving Pre owners the ability to sync their media libraries through iTunes until Cupertino dropped the banhammer. But in that case, the benefits made sense. What does MobileMe integration get someone who has opted to buy a webOS phone or tablet instead of an iPhone or iPad… and just as importantly, what does it get HP, and will Apple kick?

[via Boy Genius Report]