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Charles.Desassure
"I think there is--I've always been interested in what I call strong specifics, ...
Baolt
HP made good choice with supporting Palm with engineers, getting WebOS platform ...
Interview: HP's CTO of personal systems
Rick Merritt
7/19/2010 3:01 AM EDT
CUPERTINO, Calif. – The computer industry has more surprises in store—including new categories of mobile and even desktop products—according to a chief technology officer for Hewlett-Packard's personal computing group.
In an exclusive interview with EE Times, Phil McKinney also talked about the road map for flexible displays, Palm's WebOS as an industry platform and more.
In a keynote at the Mobilebeat 2010 conference, McKinney said there will be a range of products on a line between smartphones and notebooks such as e-books, tablets and netbooks. We asked him if there is anything else coming up on that line.
"I think there is--I've always been interested in what I call strong specifics, devices that do one function very well like a digital checkbook," said McKinney.
Each year or so McKinney hosts an internal brainstorming session where members of his team develop product concepts and prototypes. Four years ago the digital checkbook was one of them."You have to build stuff to help people understand how the products could work in people's lives," he said.
Smartphone maker Palm, acquired by HP, will be one likely source of any such new mobile products in HP's future.
"Think of Palm as the center of innovation for HP's global mobile business," he said. "Palm owns the mobile platforms [for HP and] we've taken a good sized chuck of engineers in HP working on phones and those kinds of devices and moved them into Palm," he added.
Netbook engineers stay with the Wintel-focused PC group based in Houston. "Palm is kind of the non-x86 platforms [group for] the ARM-based devices," he said.
Palm uses Texas Instruments OMAP and Qualcomm Snapdragon processors today. But the group is agnostic about processors and could even—hypothetically—port its WebOS to Intel's Atom if it wants, McKinney said.
The HP CTO sees client computing being for awhile "in a mixed mode where part of life is in the cloud" and part is in devices with local storage and apps. That will result in a need for a mix of Wintel and ARM/Linux systems, he suggested.
"We're already one of the largest ARM users in the world with our printers," he noted.
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goafrit
7/19/2010 6:22 AM EDT
HP is the new deal. It is showing what it takes to win. While I respect their other arms of business, I remain skeptical on acquisition of Palm. The latter's industry is very brutal and unforgiving. And I doubt if they have a core competence on that. But it seems Mr Hurd and co are winners and this will be no different.
But one area HP should work on; job. I am thinking they are having a reputation of layoffs. It started with Carly and Hurd is continuing it. That firm must must it before I count their success complete. HP has an obligation to keep jobs, not beat estimates.
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elctrnx_lyf
7/19/2010 11:22 AM EDT
One palm phone for each application, sounds really nice!! Wish I can also write one application. Mckinney sounds confident enough to turn out the acquisition of palm into a profitable growth in the coming years. I haven't heard much about the layoffs in HP. But one formula for any business is never to lose their best performing employees. One thing where HP might be investing is in the area of processors for server applications.
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Baolt
7/20/2010 6:43 AM EDT
HP made good choice with supporting Palm with engineers, getting WebOS platform on board and focusing on mobile products, also using webOS as admiral ship for their portfolio. Its not surprising just today we have a trademark application so called "PalmPad", which is placing their Windows 7 based "Slate".
On the other hand, HP makes it wrong with keeping all useful values of WebOS for their valued engineers or partners. What causes really limited application store and makes future of webos blur. They can mimic apple and create own development suite where application developers and partners can focus on filling out. HPs main focus should be improving usability of WebOS in different platforms and technologic improvement of mobile gadgets, not creating applications and act as like software company. Especially nowadays while Apple iPhone 4 debacle creates lots of unhappy customers, a well functioning intelligent all in 1 device would hit the market.
Let us see what HP is going to reveal in coming days.
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Charles.Desassure
7/20/2010 10:50 AM EDT
"I think there is--I've always been interested in what I call strong specifics, devices that do one function very well like a digital checkbook," said McKinney. Wait a minute; I thought this is what we were trying to get away from during the 80’s. Develop a device that can perform more than one function. Now we are returning back home to ideas that got us where we are? Wow, I see why the Wizard of Oz is a classic …”There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”
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