In what is probably a relief to NVIDIA officials, the company's struggle to find hardware vendors willing to build around its new Tegra 4 CPU seemed to be alleviated somewhat earlier this month by the new Chromebook, and now HP might be building a tablet around this new quad-core processor.
Read Write quoted anonymous sources who say that the Tegra 4 will power the tablet, and the announcement should come soon. HP has reportedly been working on this tablet since Thanksgiving, but declined to comment on rumors. During the Mobile World Congress later this month in Barcelona, Spain, HP will hold private meetings and may show off the tablet behind closed doors, but an announcement about the tablet will probably have to wait until after the conference.
The PC company has struggled to remain relevant since the advent of tablets and smartphones. It spent $1.2 billion to acquire Palm in 2010 and invested heavily in webOS, two moves that turned out to be disastrously bad decisions. The HP Touch tablet launched in July 2011, but just 48 days later HP announced that it would discontinue production and all hardware running webOS, but keep the platform as an open-source operating system.
Instead of using the webOS platform it acquired with Palm, the company's latest tablet will run Android, which should not be a surprise after reports that some Touch tablets were running Android right out of the box. Some say it looks like a desperate move on HP's part, but Android has been moving towards the desktop PC market, ReadWrite says, so this partnership with a PC market veteran would help Google penetrate that sector.
The company is exploring the possibility of a smartphone, but HP CEO Meg Whitman said earlier that it probably won't be on the market until 2014.
Toshiba and VIZIO, NVIDIA's partners, are also allegedly working to build Tegra 4 tablets.
