Customers have been telling Hewlett-Packard that they want
laptops that run Android, so the company is rolling out the SlateBook PC to
meet that demand.
The
laptop will start at $399 and be available in August.
It
has a 14-inch touchscreen and combines the familiar interface of Android on
mobile devices “with the productivity of a notebook ... in a breakthrough
design,” said Mike Nash, vice president at HP.
“It’s in a very new category. Customers told us they spend a lot
of time on mobile applications.” Nash said, adding that he received many
questions like “why can’t I access the Android ecosystem from the clamshell
form factor?”
The
SlateBook PC weighs about 1.7 kilograms, is 16 millimeters thick, has 64GB of
storage, 2GB of memory, and a fully charged battery can run for nine hours. The
touchscreen displays images at 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution. The laptop runs on
an Nvidia Tegra 4 processor, which is used in HP’s SlateBook tablets. The
Nvidia chip has 72 graphics cores and can handle 4K video playback.
HP
has added tools so Android apps will stretch out to the full 14-inch screen
size.
Both
Chromebooks and the SlateBook PC are meant for those who do most of their
computing on the Internet, but there are differences, Nash said. Using a
browser on the Android laptop isn’t as good as on Chromebooks, which are more
like desktops in that regard. But Android is used by millions of people and
some want it on laptops, Nash said.
Beyond
the user interface, the Android laptop will run applications such as Skype that
are not yet supported on Chromebooks. Android also boasts better printer
support than the Chrome OS.
HP
has had to make choices in the past on whether to use the Chrome OS or Android
in PCs. HP chose Android over Chrome for its Slate 21
Pro all-in-one, partly because Android was heavily customizable as an
open-source OS, while features in Chrome OS were controlled by Google. HP also
said that Android was cheaper to implement than Chrome OS, which had to comply
with specific hardware requirements.
The
laptop is expected to be shown at Computex this week in Taipei.
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