interesting "day after" reads on the topic - seems that the current CEO of HP is a software company minded guy (based on his past positions, so that jives with his moving out of the cut-throat PC business, but not so much with his ditching webOS.
my prediction? put this together with google's recent acquisition of Motorola's mobile device division, and with the "joy" that RIM has been having with playbook and I predict RIM picking up webOS to retool into the playbook and bolster the BB line against android and google handheld devices that are coming down the pipe.
I've been a fan of HP enterprise servers for years - pre-compaq days in fact, but have rarely touched their PCs. I used but never really gotten excited about their network devices and will probably NEVER use their NAS/SAN storage, although their internal RAID card controller software is on par with other's out there.
As for software, i've used their in house server OS (HP-UX, MPE) and never really liked it. It's okay, but there is always better more robust alternatives with wider community support.
So for me, the strength of HP has never been the in house software or the PC lines. So in my mind, this is not a bad move for them. The timing however is classic dumb.
The tablet is barely shipping and it's being killed off. And mere months back the CEO was talking about it's future and the plans down the road for it and webOS. Credibility for him and HP product lines just took a big hit to the mid section, replacing many "buy HP" mindsets with one of "wait and see". I mean, who wants to buy into a line, particularly a newly introduced line, when it could disappear next week?
As for suitability to audio applications, i find that the iFamily of devices are just as suited as are the HP tablet devices. I have complete control over my squeezebox, and other devices with any number of IR emitters that plug into the touch/pad/phone. And with the open source/app kits available, you can roll your own as you want.
