UPDATED 09:05 EDT / JULY 05 2011

HP TouchPad Under the Hood: Plans for an Improved Version

Now that Hewlett-Packard released its webOS-powered TouchPad tablet, research firm IHS iSuppli broke down the device to individual components to put on estimate on what kind of margins HP will be making of the new device.

The TouchPad comes with a 9.7-inch LF display that iSuppli believes to be similar or identical to the one found in the original iPad, along with a six-piece set of 6 touch-sensitive drives chips  from Cypress Semiconductor. These are some of more expensive chips of their kind on the market, and with the materials used for the LCD display the cost of the screen alone adds up to $144.25.

Hewlett-Packard also made an interesting choice of processors, with with what seems to be a stripped down Snapdragon.

“This appears to be a Snapdragon derivative without the baseband functions that would normally be seen on a Snapdragon. The chip costs $20, iSuppli estimates. Chances are a fully-enabled Snapdragon chip will be used in a future model.”

Qualcomm, the maker of the Snapdragon chip line-up, also provided the  Wi-Fi chips and two power management ones for TouchPad. Sandisk’s iNad products were used for flash-memory, while the system memory was provided by Samsung. The bottom line: The HP TouchPad 12GB version is priced at $499 and costs $306.25 to build, while the 32GB version has a price tag of $599 and costs HP $328.65 per unit.

Hardware-wise the TouchPad is very impressive, and it looks like we’ll be able to say the same thing about its successor – something iSuppli reckons because there is a lot of “breathing space” left under the hood for additional parts.  The tablet excels less in terms of web support, though.  In an Acid3 test conduced by Sencha, the TouchPad scored a 92/100 in HTML5 and CCS3 support, which is “good enough.”

Breathing room would be a perk for HP in certain ways, hinting at its future goals around tablet device versions.  There were similar expectations placed around the first version of the iPad, as tablet makers (especially those with supporting OS combos) feel out the consumer market.  It will be quite a task for HP, but its determined to make its mark amongst the mobile OS lords.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU