Posts Tagged ‘Hewlett Packard’
Palm’s Jon Rubinstein confesses: “I’ve touched an iPhone”
Jon Rubinstein, the former CEO of Palm who now runs the business as a unit of computing giant Hewlett-Packard, has gotten endless ribbing for his claim that he’s never touched an iPhone.
Rubinstein, before joining Palm, was a longtime Apple executive, including a stretch of time when the iPhone was under development.
He defended his comment in an interview with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, explaining that he didn’t want to be “tainted” by the user experience of another device in developing Palm’s WebOS devices.
“Did I ever use an iPhone as my personal device? No,” said Rubinstein. “Have I touched one? Yes.”
Rubinstein went on to explain why he sold Palm to HP.
“We saw a way to get to profitability, but we didn’t see a way to get to scale,” said Rubinstein. “We’d be a small, successful company, but I don’t think that’s long-term sustainable. … HP has tremendous scale.”
Rubinstein wouldn’t comment on the other companies who engaged in acquisition discussions with Palm, referring to them as “Companies A, B, C, D, and E” — a nod to Palm’s SEC filings which had similarly vague references.
HP “needs to be in mobile,” said Rubinstein. “This is something they had to do. HP needs to be in control of its own future.”
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Oh Pre, we barely knew ye: Sprint axes the Palm Pre
It that Palm made a last-ditch effort to take on the iPhone with the Palm Pre. What we got was a pretty slick phone with multitasking and a mobile operating system, WebOS, that wasn’t quite a match for the iPhone but which would .
Now things have come full circle, and Sprint — which at one point heralded the Palm Pre as its flagship device — has and signaled the end of its life.
Palm said it expected thousands of developers to quickly begin making applications for the platform. The unfortunate truth was that all those developers flocked first to the iPhone operating system, and then to Google’s Android operating system. To date, there are around .
Now that Sprint has all but killed support for the Pre, the major damage may come from a lack of developers. Most Pre users ended up on Sprint, and Sprint’s move could serve as a signal for them to upgrade to a more powerful phone. With a smaller user base, more developers will likely end up turning to the iPhone operating system, iOS, or Google’s Android to remain relevant.
A slightly upgraded Palm Pre and Palm Pixi — it’s smaller, underpowered sister — have found their way to Verizon but have been more or less unnoticed. That’s prompted Verizon to to $49.99 for the Pre and $29.99 for the Pixi — both with two-year contracts. So developers probably won’t be getting any help on Verizon’s end, either.
And Palm has suffered a slew of high-level departures. WebOS user interface designer to work on Android at Google, WebOS notification mastermind , and former senior VP of product development . Peter Skillman, , then decided to take off.
Sprint Nextel’s highly publicized launch of the Palm Pre smartphone failed to turn around losses in the company’s subscriber base yet. In the quarter after the Pre’s launch, — compared to $344 million loss in the same time a year ago. Part of that probably had to do with Palm waiting to launch the phone until after Apple .
The olive branch finally came when Hewlett-Packard . During a conference call discussing the acquisition, HP executives emphasized that was about more than phones. Executive vice president Todd Bradley described Palm’s WebOS operating system as something that can also power tablet computers (or, as HP prefers to call them, “slates”) and the low-end laptops known as netbooks.
There’s obviously a lot of potential for WebOS as is evident in the price HP paid to get it. HP also recently announced the next iteration of WebOS, as well as a new version of the Palm Pre that . But it might be too little, too late, with Android and Google clearly leading the pack in terms of App developers.
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Nvidia CEO: Oh, the places those magical Android tablets will go
Graphics chip maker
Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang thinks Google’s Android team is pretty much the best thing since sliced bread.
Huang praised Google for its work on the Android mobile operating system on Nvidia’s earnings conference call yesterday and said Nvidia .
Nvidia, which traditionally caters to gamers and designers with its , said stated in its quarterly earnings report yesterday that it plans to , specifically smartphones and other mobile devices running Android.
“Although they’re a little bit behind, the work that Google and Andy Rubin’s team is doing at Google is just really amazing,” Huang said on Nvidia’s earnings conference call. “I think (the next generation of Android tablets is) going to really, really surprise people and delight consumers everywhere.”
Apple has taken over the tablet personal computer market with its . The iPhone and iPad manufacturer currently . Meanwhile, Google’s Android operating system only accounts for about 2 percent of all tablets sold.
Pretty much everyone else is now working on a tablet. Research in Motion is making a 7-inch — and it’s undercutting the iPad with . Samsung’s, which runs on Android, is priced at an unfortunate $600 — $30 more than Apple’s cheapest 3G-enabled iPad. Hewlett-Packard is also working on an .
It wasn’t all smiles and compliments from Huang. He said Google and tablet manufacturers weren’t picking up their game to compete with the iPad. He said that the current generation of tablets was well behind the iPad and that competitors had been slow to realize the potential of tablet computers in the face of the iPad’s success. “You can’t just put an operating system on a tablet and hope that . . . you’re going to compete against the iPad,” he said.
But the wait would be well worth it, he said.
“I think that the extra time that was necessary to build these devices, and build the operating system and all the applications and the system software necessary to do it — and obviously, we’re not going to talk about what they are right now, but they’re going to be absolutely magical,” Huang said.
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Apple allows one in every 20 tablet computers to be sold by someone else
dominates the global market for tablet computers more than seven months after it launched its game-changing iPad device.
About 95 percent of all tablet computers shipped in the third quarter were iPads,. The Boston market research firm said that tablet computer shipments were up 26 percent from the previous quarter.
Google’s Android operating system accounted for just 2 percent of tablets. That percentage is expected to rise in the current quarter as more models such as Samsung’s Galaxy tab are launched, the study said.
Apple is in a race to ship as many iPad touchscreen devices as it can while competitors try to catch up. Hewlett-Packard launched a Windows 7-based tablet computer this month and hopes to ship a Palm-based tablet in early 2011. Viewsonic, Research in Motion and others have also announced plans for tablet devices. Gartner estimates that touchscreen tablets will triple to nearly 54.8 million units sold in 2011.
The high demand for tablets is hurting interest in netbooks. ChangeWave Research said its survey showed that only 14 percent of respondents say their next portable device purchase will be a netbook, down from 24 percent in June. But 26 percent plan on buying a tablet. Of those, 80 percent are likely to buy an iPad.
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How Apple could become the world’s biggest tech company (reader poll)
Not many companies get a second chance. In that respect, has led a charmed life. The company led the first boom in personal computers but fell behind the PC juggernaut as Microsoft, the PC clone makers, and a broad array of PC industry supporters soared past Apple, leaving it with about 2 percent of the personal computer market.
Steve Jobs was booted from the company and he came back. He shut down Apple’s clone-licensing program and shifted into the mobile device market with the iPod. That device disrupted the music player market and ushered in the era of cheap content with 99 cent songs. The iPhone extended that disruption into the smartphone market. With apps leading the charge, Apple has grabbed a huge share of the smartphone market.
If Apple hangs onto this market share, it could become the. As Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, recently said, computing is now shifting to the phone. We will become a mobile first society as desktop computers and laptops are marginalized by emergence of powerful super phones. Apple has already surpassed the and in September quarter it passed up Microsoft’s revenues for the first time in 15 years.
On a worldwide basis, Apple has just 4.1 percent of the mobile phone market, up from 2.5 percent a year ago, . Nokia still ships about eight times more phones than Apple does.
But in smartphones, the story is different. Apple has, the maker of the BlackBerry, in terms of smartphones sold per quarter. If Apple hangs on to a larger market share of smartphones — which are poised to become the world’s biggest tech product — then it could become the giant of technology.
Android has emerged to challenge Apple. Through broad and open licensing, Google hopes to overtake Apple and marginalize it the same way that happened in PCs.
Jobs is in a mad scramble to make sure that doesn’t happen, launching its phones in new territories as fast as it can. In that respect, getting off the ground in China, where Android had a lead, was very important to Apple. The company is opening Apple stores everywhere in hopes of marketing its brand as a lifestyle experience. It is using its profits and considerable cash to advertise around the world.
— or make more of layers of its products than others do — and succeed. It makes its own operating systems, its own hardware, its own microprocessor chips, and sells devices in its own stores. That allows it to capture more margin and take back revenues that were once considered lost to partners such as Intel or Best Buy.
At the same time, Apple leverages the work of companies such as microprocessor architecture licensor ARM, contract chip manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, and hardware assembler Foxconn. Those partners help give Apple the manufacturing and design scale it needs. Apple might even try to cut carriers out of the equation with a move to SIM cards in Europe.
Google hopes to isolate Apple with the openness argument. But the way to beat Apple is to match it on the experience and design of outstanding products and then to bring down the price through high-volume efficiencies. That’s how the tablet makers, phone makers, and PC makers hope to take away Apple’s momentum. At some point, Apple will have to decide whether it wants to become more open and to play in the lowest cost markets.
If it makes the right moves, it could stay ahead of Microsoft and Google and catch up with the likes of IBM and Hewlett-Packard. HP is far behind in smartphones, but it generated $30.7 billion in its most recent quarter ended July 31. Apple posted revenue of $20.3 billion in the quarter ended Sept. 30, while Microsoft reported revenue of $16 billion and IBM reported revenue of $24.3 billion. Apple isn’t all that far away from being on top.
To get to the top and stay there, Apple will have to figure out some tough competitive problems. It will have to try to beat Nokia in the rest of the world in low-cost cell phones. It will likely have to figure out how to challenge HP and IBM in enterprise markets. It has only begun to crack those markets with its mobile devices. But it probably will also need a stronger resurgence of the Mac as a platform in order to make headway. It also needs Apple TV to succeed in a big way and use that success to lever its way into the video game console business ().
Perhaps these challenges are too big and it’s just a fantasy. But to even consider this possibility — that Apple could become the biggest tech company — is a victory in itself. Just a few years ago, it would have seemed ridiculous. Only Apple’s own potential missteps and a broad alliance of enemies can stop Apple.
What’s your own opinion? Please leave a comment and vote in our poll below.
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Hewlett-Packard Unveils Real-World Memristor, Chip of the Future
"In theory we can connect thousands of layers in a very straightforward fashion," Stan Williams, and scientist at HP, told the BBC. "It could provide a way of getting a ridiculous amount of memory on a chip."
Memristors improve on transistors in three key ways. First off, they allow the same device to serve as the processor and the memory. Right now, computers need separate devices for memory (such as solid state flash memory or regular magnetic hard drives) and processing (the computer chip itself). By eliminating the communication time and energy between those different parts of hardware, a memristor system would work far faster, and with far less energy, than a traditional computer.
Second, memristors can be much smaller than transistors. Quantum mechanics limits how tiny transistors can be, a limit that current technology is rapidly approaching. Memristors would allow computer chips to continue getting smaller past that point, all without resorting to exotic tricks like graphene chips or quantum computing.
Lastly, unlike transistors, which only work linearly, memristors can form three-dimensional networks. This added dimension exponentially expands the number of connections, and thus the power, of a memristor computer. In fact, the 3-D network capability of memristors is so profound that Leon Chua, the man who first theorized the existence of memristors in the 1971, believes that this technology could enable the creation of electronic brains. "We have the right stuff now to build real brains," he told the .
Hewlett Packard has already created a few simple devices that run on memristors as proof of concept, and they think that they can have the first working models capable of replacing some current computer parts within three years. However, with memristors enabling chip development for decades past where transistors would have hit their physical limit, the true value of this advance may not be realized for years to come.
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