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HP UK wins the Tablet gamble with early launch of PC 4200

The first HP Tablet - a pen-driven notebook - was not a big success. That seems to have fooled some of HP's own executives into hyper-caution over the new one - a mistake which the UK has avoided.

The original was widely seen as slow and clunky - very unlike the new model which has the "Sonoma" chipset, launched by Intel this year as the latest "Centrino" technology. As a result of their memories of the old one, the European marketing team decided to hold off a launch of the new - with the exception of the UK, where the product is now in good demand.

Product managers in the UK decided that the new machine looked like a winner, and decided to discount much of the early negative feedback which the earlier model had generated. "We placed an order with the factory as soon as machines were available," commented one UK executive, "and now, the rest of Europe is suddenly pleading with us for stock."

The new PCC 4200 is a full Pentium Mobile chip - a lot faster than you'd guess from its 1.6 GHz clock speed unless you understood PC clocks very well. The previous HP Tablet was based on the ultra-low-power Crusoe chip from Transmeta - an attempt to extend battery life, which backfired in the market.

"The problem with the original," commented analyst http://www.livejournal.com/users/sbisson/ Simon Bisson, "was that the processor really wasn't up to expectations. But HP was determined to succeed with it, and virtually gave away thousands to top European corporate buyers, making it a very high profile product. So when it got bad comment, there was more of it than you'd expect."

The new one, which has an extended battery option giving it up to 12 hours continuous life, is a very different design, and while the EMEA marketing team won't get stocks till July, the UK is finding demand "encouraging" say insiders.

"We've had feedback from some saying that the design is old-fashioned," admitted a marketing executive drily, "but you can never please everybody - and 80% of the people we've shown it to think it will re-capture some of the market share we lost last year."