HTC plans a tablet and sees women as a major market

SOCIAL NOTWORKING women who want to surf while watching the telly in their living room are a prime market for tablets according to HTC.

Market research conducted by the smartphone manufacturer found that likely users of the expensive drink trays were women who wanted to communicate with friends with a tablet on their lap while watching their favourite television programmes.

HTC vice president Europe, Dr Florian Seiche, speaking at the Open Mobile Summit held in London, said "Our study found women social networking while watching television was a likely use for tablets".

Giving no more details about HTC's tablet plans, Seiche did talk about Google's Android OS as having a big future in the business market.

Meanwhile over in Scandinavia, 4G networks might enable women to watch telly and social network all on their tablet. Describing webtv as an application that will drive a lot of 4G network traffic, Nordic telecommunications company Teliasonera's president for mobility, Håkan Dahlström told the summit that around half of its subscribers are Iphone owners. µ

HP Hurricane webOS tablet may be released in 3rd quarter

New HP tablet to run webOS
image source: Palm

We first speculated that since HP bought out Palm, they would come out wth a webOS tablet. According to many industry insiders, this appears to be more of a reality now. An insider at HP tells us that a webOS tablet under the code name HP Hurricane could be released the third quarter of this year.

Not too long ago--actually, only three weeks back--HP was still bragging about its HP Slate, a Windows 7 based tablet that was supposed to become the new iPad killer. However, early reviews suggested that the HP slate should just kill itself and that's exactly what appears to have happened.

"It is a really interesting device, but runs as slow as a turtle," says Los Angeles industry analyst Paul Mueller. "I think they could have had something with a faster processor, but that would have led to less battery life than the Slate already had." Like us, Mr. Mueller looks forward to the HP Hurricane. "If rumors of this tablet are true, this can be a killer device--webOS is an outstanding operating system for a tablet."