HP pushes commercial mobility focus

HP has announced a range of commercial tablets with a focus on business applications as the company splits its PCs and printing business from the enterprise and services business divisions.

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise will offer a portfolio of technology infrastructure, software and services for corporate IT needs, while HP Inc. will target the personal.

The HP Pro Tablet 408 G1 (€249) is an Intel Atom powered Windows 8.1 Pro tablet with an 8 inch screen, 2GB RAM and 32 GB of storage. The HP Pro Slate 12  (€529) is an Android 4.4 tablet powered by a Qualcomm ARM-based system on a chip processor. HP has also introduced industry-specific versions of its  ElitePad 1000 tablet. There is an HP ElitePad 1000 G2 Healthcare (€1,369) version and an ElitePad 1000 G2 Rugged Tablet (€1,469). Both are equipped with a 10.1 inch screen, 128 GB of storage, 4 GB of RAM and run Windows 8.1 64 Pro. HP has also launched the Elite x2 1011 G1 (€999 ), hybrid tablet/laptop which offers a detachable keyboard.

Michael Park, who heads up the commercial mobility arm at HP, said: "Over the last 18 months the company has re-invented the way it plans products to focus on being use case centric. It became obvious that mobility was driving a lot of the use cases. We’d love to build cool devices, but the customer needs more."

He said 28% of desktop users also use mobile devices. Six months ago Park began working on an initiative to combine devices, software and services for enterprises, small- and mid-sized businesses and the education sectors. Unlike a traditional Windows PC, Park said IT managers need to think about connectivity and how to manage mobile applications and security. "A commercial customer needs a solution for business that thinks about the application, the devices, connectivity, back-end legacy applications in the datacentre and how all of these things come together."