CEO Meg Whitman said that HP together with PSG will be stronger.

Eventual changes to webOS hardware have not been mentioned.

This statement confirms a change of the decision made by the former CEO of the company, Leo Apotheker, in August. The general feeling was that his forced exit was determined by this particular decision. Many interpreted that Apotheker tried to recreate a business model of SAP, his previous employer, from the inside. Whitman produced confusion when saying that plans were still viable and the problem was not the decision itself but its execution.

Hewlett Packard’s rivals are believed to have hoped to the company splitting off the PC division. The group would have become a target for a sale and they could have bought market share. By distancing the new created company from the Hewlett Packard name, the PSG would become weaker, less familiar, and the safety net provided by the larger HP in case of trouble would be eliminated.

Many had failed to understand why HP would willingly give up what is considered probably the most successful PC group in the world. Apotheker had acknowledged that a certain iPad effect was visible in cutting into HP’s notebook and netbook sales. However, the company still leads in worldwide PC market share and is not seeing a rapid drop like Acer and other netbook-heavy companies do.

Paul D’Arcy, from PC builder, said that some benefits were obvious when getting a tablet, such as mobility, mainly for retail or health care. However, he expressed his doubt they could ever replace PCs immediately. In his opinion, adding these devices would present another challenge to workers who already support personal computers and smartphones.

D’Arcy says tablets can be substitutes for paper-based systems and are supposed to bring new productivity standards, but they would be no more than companion devices and in no case replacements for existing PCs. According to D’Arcy, as long as strategies are still evolving in the market and the ecosystem is not yet mature, PCs are not dead.

The study, however, revealed significant interest in tablet devices and contradicted in part Dell’s conclusions. For example, 53 percent of IT officers interviewed manifested more than low interest in tablets, the majority being executives that had asked for their own device. Expectations of companies are that a large part of their staff would find tablets more useful. One piece of the survey showed last summer that 82 percent saw official sustenance for smartphones and tablets increasing at least five percent for the next two years.

Some doubts are related to the study that Dell and Intel paid for in February, as both would benefit from keeping the iPad and others out of the workplace. The non-PC tablets of Dell have been limited to the Streak line, which is home oriented, while all its business sales are focused on notebooks and desktops. Intel has a minority stake in tablets because of its Atom processors, but also makes significantly more money from desktop and notebook chips.

Specific effects manifested on corporate buying have not been mentioned, but the iPad has determined a decrease in overall PC sales, as businesses were supposed to delay their system upgrades. At the same time, mobile OS tablets like those of Apple or those based on Google’s platform only in some cases have desktop-level software and usually do not reach the expansion needed or wanted by companies. However, they have appeared into top firms as alternatives for notebooks used for e-mail, presentations or mobile-friendly applications like Salesforce.

Lenovo’s ThinkCentre M81 can be had in either a small or tower form factor. Storage can be had up to a 160GB solid state drive, as well as a choice of AMD discrete Radeon graphics or Intel HD graphics. There is also USB 3.0 and SATA III onboard. The Lenovo Enhanced Experience 2.0 for Windows 7 and RapidBoot tech offers the possibility of faster boot up times for either new PC.

Lenovo’s ThinkStation E30 will start shipping in May, being priced at $629, while the ThinkCentre M81 will arrive sometime in April for $599.

The computer was introduced in 1997, at a price of $7,500. It was illustrating both the concepts and the philosophy that would dominate the future design aesthetic of Apple after the comeback of its CEO Steve Jobs. Some elements like the unusual vertically-oriented and thin all-in-one design, the exceptional high quality of the sound system, the optical drive vertically-mounted, the active-matrix LCD screen considered the best at the time, the detachable trackpad replacing the common mouse and last, but not least, the luxurious, high-quality finish, have deeply impressed the large public.

The industrial design generated enthusiastic reviews although consumers did not appreciate the high price of the computer. As a matter of fact, the price dropped to half the original listing soon enough and even went under $2,000 before the limited production run ended. The look and sound of the device were quite revolutionary for that time, but the internal parts were almost standard. Off-the-rack parts were used that represented very little advancement over the cheaper desktop Macs already existing. The computer was mainly targeting at executives and wealthy customers. An audio buzzing that affected a few units has been fixed about a year after the device’s release.

The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, or the TAM, as it was called, only can run as high as Mac OS 9.1 and cannot be upgraded to OS X. However, many devices are still in use, an important part of them thanks to later 3G upgrade options which were implemented by third-party companies.

The unit on auction is located in Keller, Texas and shipping it will require $35 in the United States or overseas. The only indication of the twenty years passed since the unit has been made is that its original batteries have expanded, although they do not leak, as the owner claims.

The computer is being sold “as-is” because testing is impossible, but all components as well as a full set of accessories being part of the original package are still in the original containers. The bidding price on Monday morning was $28.13 and only a few people had viewed the auction.

A decline in the notebook market in China certainly had a role in this trend, but it seems there is a general loss of enthusiasm for the notebook category lately, as Ranjit Atwal from Gartner said. A part of this slowdown is due to customers who had not been committed to buy a tablet but did not want to buy a notebook either until they found out what to expect. The iPad 2 is determinant for this situation, as most of the other tablets scheduled for this year have been unveiled earlier, even by several months.

Gartner estimates that notebooks were loosing the battle since their engineering had not kept the pace with tablets. They neither were light enough nor were long-lasting as tablets are, to be bought for mobile use. People now want more and more always-on applications and services. Tablets, which are considered ‘mobile’ PCs, are easier to transport than real PCs, according to analysts from Gartner.

If this projection is accurate, Microsoft would be by far the most affected. The company had profited from the netbook ascending trend during the past three years, but has now to reconsider its strategy, viewing the multitude of tablets which run mobile operating systems. Windows PC sales have been dragged down by the iPad and in a certain degree by the Galaxy Tab, because customers simply wanted to own a device for tasks like reading e-mails or casually playing games or browsing the web and therefore have chosen the iOS or Android instead of having a bigger and heavier PC.

His initial predictions for the growth of PC sales were lowered from 9.5 percent to only seven percent, while tablets are expected to eat not less than ten percent of the whole possible notebook market in 2011.

Moskowitz expects the iPad to still be in lead in 2011, but it would lose enough of its quasi-monopoly from last year to Android. His estimations are that Apple would not lose its absolute majority in 2011 with 60.8 percent, but 2012 would see it drop at 44.6 percent, although enough to still be in lead. The ability Apple has for mastering profit margins and keeping prices up would make it get 60.5 percent of total tablet revenues next year, despite more competitors coming on the market.

Apple’s competitors have got tablet-optimized interfaces only about a whole year after the launch of the iPad. The Xoom of Motorola is hipping now with Android 3.0, while the Optimus Pad of LG and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 of Samsung will join it. Research in Motion will also enter the tablet world with its BlackBerry PlayBook. The TouchPad of Hewlett Packard may be the one to make webOS one of the very few non-Android platforms to challenge Apple.

Both devices use a 23-inch, 1,080-pixel display and get an unusual accent on sound by using the Beats audio from notebooks and towers. There is also a new spin for software through LinkUp, which is an application that allows users to share applications between desktops and notebooks.

The TouchSmart 610 has a 3.2GHz Core i3 processor, a 750GB hard drive, 4G of RAM and Intel integrated video. The higher-end version has a similarly clocked processor Core i5, a 1TB hard drive and 6GB of memory. The TouchSmart 9300 is designed for business and has the option to be wall mounted, turned into a kiosk or otherwise made ready for the public. Hewlett Packard did not give specifications, but the processor would be scaled from Core i3 to i7 and there would be options for other operating systems. A 160GB SSD and 16GB of RAM complete the list of features.

The TouchSmart 610 will ship on February 9 at a price of $900, while the 9300 would not be ready until May and its price would be set closer to the release time. The delay of the 9300 is attributed in part to the Sandy Bridge chipset flaw that affects the performance of SATA. There is already a fix available from Intel but the production could not be restored before two months.

The release of the two PCs is representative for the attempts to get desktops with fully integrated touch. Hewlett Packard has been one of the first to adopt touchscreen for desktops and enjoyed enough success with its TouchSmart line as to continue it for many years. However, it has not become the company’s dominant desktop and has even been criticized sometimes for supposed limited utility. Apple was among those who objected to touchscreens used outside tablets and phones, arguing that touch requires a horizontal position and not a vertical one. Its solution ahs been to equip traditional controllers with multitouch, as in the case of the Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad or notebook trackpads.

MSI has an even better technical solution than HP in its Butterfly concept, but has not committed to shipping PCs.

The one-year anniversary of Windows 7 was on the same day Microsoft stopped allowing Windows XP to be preloaded on new PCs. The simplest version is Windows 7 Starter and it is largely preloaded on netbooks and notebooks instead of XP, while Vista is no more an option.

Windows XP was the cheapest operating system for the platform and this helped it to maintain its position in the netbook market. Its price is $15 per netbook, while Vista and Windows 7 Starter cost at least $30. Microsoft is supposed to have dumped the price of XP in order to force Linux to leave the netbook market, which was earlier dominated by platforms independent from Microsoft.

The first time Sharp detailed its plans for an upcoming range of Android-based tablets was in September. The Galapagas tablet and eBook series is scheduled to ship in December and is expected to be supported by an extended online bookstore.

One hundred popular titles will be available for the launch of the store, which is optimized for quick downloads. Concerns of customers about forswearing physical media will be lessen by the possibility of re-downloading purchased games as many times as necessary and when required.

The PC Games on Demand Marketplace for Windows will launch on the 15th of November and can be accessed through http://www.gamesforwindows.com.