Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shows the first "slate" PCs made by HP (pictured), Archos and Pegatron.
During a keynote tonight at the Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled a new computer category: Slate PCs running Windows 7!
One of the first prototypes came from HP which confirmed it will ship in 2010. “It’s a finished products. I have several on my desks,” confided to me Phil McKinney, HP’s CTO at Pepcom’s Digital Experience press event.
Slate PCs deserve a better fate than Tablet PCs
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showing off the first 3 Slate PCs
With this announcement I couldn’t help but think of Bill Gates unveiling another promising PC category: the Tablet PC six years ago, also at CES.
But I have a feeling the Slate PCs will have a better fate than the Table PCs that never took off as a consumer or enterprise category. Time will certainly tell.
Follows a short video of the HP Slate PC captured by the Palo Alto, Calif.-company:
For Black friday next week, Walmart will slash $100 off Sanyo's 50" Plasma TV price, that now retails for $698
A CNNMoney.com report revealed some of Walmart’s amazing “doorbusters” planned for next week’s Black Friday.
TVs/Blu-ray
Sanyo 50-inch plasma 720p HDTV for $598;
Emerson 32-inch LCD 720p HDTV for $248;
Emerson 42-inchPlasma 720p HDTV ($448)
Magnavox Blu-ray player for $78;
Computers
eMachine laptop with a 15.6-inch LCD display, 2GB memory and 160GB hard drive for $198;
Hewlett-Packard laptop with a 15.6-inch display, 3GB memory and 250GB hard drive for $298;
Electronics
iPod Touch 8GB for $195 with a $50 iTunes gift card;
Tom Tom GPS for $59;
Best Buy, Target and perhaps Fry’s are going to have a hard time to beat Walmart prices. I don’t have much hope for the other “smaller” retailers like Office Depot, OfficeMax and the likes.
Moreover, Wal-Mart will match the price of any local competitor’s printed ad for an identical product.
Teradata R&D boss Scott Gnau dismisses competitors
At Teradata’s user conference this week in Washington D.C., I chatted with CTO Scott Gnau about the database company main competitors (Oracle, IBM and a lesser extend HP Neoview and Netezza) as well as its views on cloud computing, virtualisation and Flash-memory.
“Our win-rate [against competitors] is much higher than 50%,” says Gnau.
Let’s try to understand why with part 1 of our interview with Scott Gnau on Teradata competitors.
What are your thoughts on Oracle’s Exadata database machine version 2?
The architecture of Exadata v.2 still has the same bottleneck than the prior version, because it’s still a rack, a monolithic non-parallel database. The database is a single instance on the rack, a single point of failure, and it will [fail]. The only implementation of the [Oracle] rack that I’ve seen are for failover and disaster recovery. So it’s not a massively scalable database.
But Oracle did optimise their I/O channel. So it’s running better certainly in a lot of comparisons of Oracle [v.1] to Oracle [v.2]. But they haven’t fixed the memory locking that exists in the normal frontside Oracle database in the rack.
So when you get to the level where you need to do extreme datamining, it’s constrained. But if you want to do simple reporting, simple list pulls, it works okay!
IBM?
I heard they had something coming last week! The rumour is that it’s coming soon! [probably at next week's Information OnDemand 2009 conference in Las Vegas where Big Blue should unveil a database machine competing with Oracle's Exadata].
And HP’s inability to compete with its Neoview offering?
You can use hammer to put a screw in the wall. But a screwdriver works much better. I think they are trying to retrofit some technologies and have had some trouble. Does go to proof that one person [Mark Hurd, in this case, who was a supporter of Teradata while at NCR] can’t a change a company sometimes!
Finally, Netezza?
They have got this hardware assist but they still got a problem in a host node, kind of the front end, where the actual database isn’t parallel. They have the same bottleneck than Oracle, but they have a lot less robust database [than Oracle] (feature, functionality, integration). So they have similar architecture constrain. But if you want to go run a couple reports that are not complicated, well defined, it will work fine. But if you want to do more – and that’s where the money is – you’re going to find yourself limited.
4-years after launching it’s high-end telepresence solution – Halo – H-P doubles down on visio-conferencing and introduces SkyRoom at the DEMOfall conference in San Diego, Calif.
In a nutshell, think of SkyRoom as a peer-to-peer version of Halo for desktops (equipped with a dual-core processor or better) to create meetings with up to 3 people. What I liked was the professional HD-quality of the video transmission that would make easy to share a movie, an engineering drawing… The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is also working on connecting SkyRoom and Halo systems together.
Here’s a video excerpt of my conversion with Jim Zafarana, H-P’s vice-president and general manager of the Workstation Global Business Unit, about SkyRoom:
HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web: an all-in-one printer glued to an iPod touch, with a capacitive touchscreen and an App Store!
It’s been a very very long time since I was exciting about using a printer. A bit like using an uninterruptible power supply or a backup system!
But with it’s latest all-in one printer/scanner/fax, H-P makes printing cool again.
The Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web (with the money H-P spends in marketing, it could have easily found a more shorter and sexier name!) uses the same printing engine than the currently shipping Photosmart Premium C8180 – a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth multi-function printer which it will be replacing – but with an iPod touch-like capacitive touchscreen instead of the current smaller screen and series of buttons, and combined with H-P’s Apps Studio; yet another applications store.
H-P takes a page from the iPhone playbook and starts an Apps Store for printers
And just as with the iPhone, Palm Pre, etc., it will soon be possible to download apps for your printer!
At the launch event earlier today hosted at Al Gore’s Current TV studios in San Francisco, H-P showed apps from USA Today, Google, Fandango, Coupons.com, DreamWorks Animation, Nickelodeon, Web Sudoku, Weathernews as well as the company’s online site Snapfish.
With these apps, you’ll be able to customize, choose, print… daily news, maps, coupons, coloring pages, movie tickets, recipes, personal calendars and more – all at the touch of a finger.
Under the hood, the Web printer is running Linux with Nokia’s Qt application and graphical-user interface framework.
The Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web will be available in the U.S. in September for $399 (the current Photosmart Premium, model C8180, is being discounted at less than $250 on Amazon.com) and next year for the rest of the world.
Here’s an excerpt of our exclusive interview with product marketing manager Ravikiran Adusumilli, going into more details on the printer capabilities (Wi-Fi setup, touchscreen, micro-transactions, auto-duplex printing…) that took 1.5 years to get to market:
Without EDS, H-P financial quaterly results would have been dismal
[Update] H-P said it will trim 2 percent of its 321,000 employees this year or 6,400 jobs, in addition to the already announced cuts associated with the EDS acquisition. Most the firing will happen outside the U.S. confirmed the Palo Alto, Calif.-company.
The recession is hitting H-P right at its core.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-company saw a revenue and profit decline in all of its businesses – aside of the Services division (more on that later) – including, PCs, servers, printers, software and financial services.
Even H-P’s golden egg, its Imaging and Printing Group (IPG), recorded a double digit decline in revenue (-23%), to $5.9 billion, from the same period a year ago.
On the other hand, H-P’s Services division recorded a whopping 99% increase in revenue to $8.5 billion, and an amazing 130% surge in profits, to $1.2 billion!
But the comparison is obviously flawed as H-P closed the EDS acquisition only last August and did not include EDS financial results until then.
Although H-P’s short-term outlook is still sombre, with revenue flat to down 2% sequentially, the world’s largest IT company still sees only a modest revenue drop for the year, at about 4% to 5%.
Apple needs to come up with a low cost PC to weather the downturn (mock up by Isamu Sanada)
H-P is now the world’s undisputed leader of the computer market, period.
Until today, Dell always bragged that it was selling more PCs in the U.S. market than its Palo Alto, Calif.-rival.
But according to studies released today by analyst firms Gartner and IDC, H-P now holds the crown with a 27.6 percent market share, ahead of Dell at 26.3 percent.
Low-cost PC sales growth helped avoid steeper fall
However, today’s analysts findings contradict Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini optimistic comments made yesterday about an end of the PC industry slide, as worldwide PC shipments for the first quarter of 2009 continue to decline: -7.1 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago for IDC and -6.5 percent for Gartner.
Apple also suffered from the continuing downturn and saw a 1.1 percent decline globally of its Macintosh sales. “Apple’s relatively higher ASP (average selling price) created challenges for it in the tough economy,” said Gartner analysts.
Dell's aspiration to enter the smartphone business might be short lived
Entering the highly competitive mobile handset market with a poorly conceived product and little carriers support surely spells trouble for Dell, told Collin Stewarts analyst Ashok Kumar in a note to clients today.
“Dell plans to enter the smart handset market in a unique manner, by launching its products directly to the retailer… Dell committed itself to the handset business with a poorly planned feature set and cost targets,” wrote Kumar.
Although Dell is a newbie in the mobile phone space, the head of its consumer business – Ron Garriques – is no less than the former chief of Motorola’s handset division.
And talking to Garriques on a visit last year at Dell’s corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas, the ex-Motorola executive is focused on not repeating the mistakes done under his watch at Motorola.
But will consumers buy a product that carriers think is not good enough, asks Kumar. “The early verdict appears to indicate that Dell’s handset is more like a “me too” product with a cost structure that offers little advantage over established players like Apple, Nokia and RIM,” suggests the analyst.
On a related news, Dell is reported to launch its smartphone in China, rather sooner than later. What may be a flop in the U.S., may find a public in China, where Dell enjoys a good reputation.
Of course, time will tell. But if H-P was unsuccessful attracting carriers and customers (even its own employees!) to its Windows Mobile phones, its hard to imagine Dell having better luck to crack the world’s mobile market.
When launching the latest Xeon server chip, Intel conveniently omitted to talk about its “other” server family, the Itanium.
Probably because Itanium has simply not lived up to the expectation Intel – and others – set forth, almost 15 years ago.
Then Itanium was predicted to dominate the server business, and then trickle down to eventually get into desktops and notebooks. And ultimately replace the X86 architecture altogether, recalls chip analyst Nathan Brookwood.
Well, obviously that didn’t happen and never will even if all of the major server suppliers like H-P, Unisys, Hitachi, NEC, Silicon Graphics – but to the exception of Sun and IBM – have adopted Itanium as their mainframe alternative platform.
“Itanium has become the prefered plaftorm for the also rans in the server business,” quipped Brookwood.
Despite its commercial failure, Intel still wants to hang on to Itanium. And that’s because, Itanium is the only server chip in Intel’s arsenal that can actually compete with the reliability and scalability of its rival RISC-processors like Sun’s SPARC or IBM’s POWER. “[Itanium] is delivering to that very high end mission critical market segment,” explained Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s vice president in charge of the server business.
However, to lower development costs, Intel decided to converge the Itanium platform to the Xeon platform (chipset, QPI’s fast interconnect…). “That will happen when the next generation of the Itanium chip, Tukwila, will launch [probably later this year],” adds Brookwood.
The good news for enterprise customers and the server OEMs like H-P, is that Itanium is not going away. The bad news for Intel, is that it will never be a growth opportunity.
Here’s an excerpt of Brookwood’s comments on Itanium:
H-P is testing Google's Android as a future system for its computers, netbooks and smartphones, confirms H-P's marketing executive, Satjuv Chahil.
This evening, H-P confirmed to TechPulse360 that it is looking at Google’s Android to power its future PCs and smartphones.
Currently, the world’s largest PC maker offers Windows and Linux
on its PCs, laptops and netbooks and runs Windows Mobile on its line of handhelds and smartphones.
“As the world’s leading computer company, we want to understand all the OS choices in the marketplace that may be used by its competitors or potentially even deployed by us to meet customer needs,” confirms Satjiv Chahil, the senior vice president of global marketing for HP’s Personal Systems Group.
Google’s Android operating system could first appear in H-P’s smartphones, instead of Windows Mobile; a product line that so far has gain little traction in the marketplace.
“So we’re studying Android’s capabilities for potential use in the computer and communications industries,” adds Chahil.
Can anyone @IBM fix the WiFi network at #IOD11 ? It's been terrible for the past 2 days and everybody I talked just can't stand it anymore 6 months ago
Posted by TechPulse 360 
