CES Unveiled is the traditional curtain raiser for CES, allowing a limited number of companies access to journalists for three hours on the Sunday evening before the show starts proper. Autonomy, the company that reportedly cost HP a cool $11.7 billion back in August 2011, was one such company, and we caught a demo of its augmented reality technology.

The video is streamed directly to the app once it recognises the image, and then saved locally so that it can be viewed without eating up your data on subsequent occasions. For people like me, who can’t recognise faces almost a minute after I’ve been introduced to someone, the business card application looks particularly interesting.

HP isn’t the first name you think of when it comes to good looking laptops. It’s probably not even the fifth or sixth. But the HP Envy 14 Spectre Ultrabook might just alter that perception.

We were given a hands-on demonstration of the Spectre at CES today, and it’s one of the most immediately impressive Windows laptops we’ve ever smeared fingerprints over. HP’s product group director had to keep a cloth close to hand, because this 13.3in laptop is pure glass on top, with a grippy rubberised base. With the HP logo glowing through the lid, it’s a visually striking and very smart looking laptop. The wrist rest is also a slab of glass, giving a smooth, cool-to-touch surface from which to type on. The touchpad, meanwhile, offers multitouch gesture support that’s as slick as anything we’ve seen outside of Apple’s laptops.

The attention to detail on the Spectre is exceptional. It’s fitted with a proximity sensor, which illuminates the backlit keyboard when you’re ready to type, and dims the keys when you’re sitting back and watching a movie, eliminating any distractions. Each of those backlit keys has its own LED, allowing HP to light up individual keys to suit the situation: illuminating the volume controls when the laptop’s playing music, for example.

Further care has been taken with the ports running down the left hand side. To keep the Ethernet jack the same size as the other ports, it’s fitted with a little drawer that widens the port when you plug in the cable. Alongside the Ethernet jack there’s a Mini DisplayPort, HDMI and two USB 3 ports – although HP has omitted the suddenly fashionable Thunderbolt port “for cost reasons”, which seems a little parsimonious on a premium laptop such as this. An enormous headphone socket and SD card reader rounds off the left-hand side of the laptop.

The right-hand ports are devoted to music controls, which allow you to listen to your music collection with the lid down. Here you’ll find a volume wheel, a mute button and another that launches the Beats audio control panel. The speakers are located on the base of the laptop, and emit a decent wallop of volume by rebounding the sound off the surface they’re placed on.

HP hasn’t taken its eye off the ball when it comes to the accessories, either. The charger is compact enough to fit in Ronnie Corbett’s top pocket, and includes a USB socket for charging MP3 players, smartphones etc, which is a thoughtful touch. The laptop arrives in a stylish black cardboard box that looks like it should be housing a cut-glass decanter, and there’s also a stylish fabric sleeve for the laptop inside the box. It’s the kind of package they wouldn’t be ashamed to hand out to celebs at an awards ceremony.

The Screen

Stunning packaging and all the other trimmings would be fore nothing if the core computer wasn’t up to scratch, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here. For a start, the screen is stunning. HP claims it’s a 14in display trapped in a 13.3in laptop chassis, which we’re still struggling to wrap our Vegas air-conditioned brains around, but whatever the mathematical gymnastics, it’s a beauty. A resolution of 1,600 x 900 delivers a delectably crisp image, and the viewing angles are astonishing: at one point we were sitting at almost a right angle to the screen, and we could still comfortably see the demo video.

Inside, the Spectre can be specced with either a Core i5 or Core i7 processor (Sandy Bridge, not the much-touted Ivy Bridge revision, which has yet to make an appearance here at CES). It can be fitted with up to 256GB of solid-state storage and ether 4GB or 6GB of RAM.

Bundled software hasn’t been neglected, either. There are full versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements and a two-year licence for Norton Internet Security.

So how much will this tempting package cost? A minimum of €1,299, which pushes it towards the premium end of the Ultrabook spectrum and on a level with the 13in MacBook Air. We’ll wait until we get one into the Labs before delivering a definitive verdict, but we can’t wait to get our hands on one again.

I was lucky. Using a barrage of open browser windows I managed to order one of the £89 bargains via Best Buy. I didn’t fully believe I’d succeeded until it turned up on my doorstep two days later.

I’m not the first to say that the TouchPad itself is a lovely piece of hardware and, following the immediate over-the-air update, webOS is stable, capable, reasonably fast and well-thought out. Indeed, looking at the package as a whole, whilst the hardware is not quite as luxurious as the iPad 2, I would place webOS well ahead of iOS4 largely due to its effortless multitasking. It’s a technological tragedy that this device and its OS are now a thing of the past.

According to isuppli.com, the TouchPad costs £200 in materials and labour to build, almost exactly the same as the iPad 2. Conventional logic is to take the build cost and add a margin to come to your retail price, aligning yourself to comparable hardware. This lead to a release price of £399 for the 16GB model which is on a par with the iPad 2.

The problem with this is that it gives potential buyers no good reason to choose the newcomer over the established giant. I estimate that Apple makes around £150-£200 profit on each iPad sold and uses the AppStore to drive hardware sales (although their 30% share of the projected £2 billion pound of revenue the AppStore will earn in 2011 is hardly to be sniffed at).

HP couldn’t hope to do the same with such a limited app store, so the only way it could have made an impact would have been to reverse the logic – make its long term money from apps rather than the hardware. Had the TouchPad been launched at £250 it could easily have been a massive success, which would have created an audience for app developers to target. Particularly the work-related apps that HP’s business image would suit. HP could then have taken a cut of its app store revenue.

The problem is that this approach takes time, with HP barely breaking even on the hardware, let alone the associated R&D and marketing costs. Looked at this way, the TouchPad was doomed as soon as HP chose the webOS route – however good the OS is, it has only limited developer support.

Android-based tablets have more chance because developers can target more than one device with a single app. But the real challenger to Apple is likely to be Amazon. It’s already demonstrated with the latest version of the Kindle that it’s prepared to sell hardware at a market-breakingly low price in order to make money on downloads. As an example, I paid £109 for my Kindle in October last year but I reckon I’ve spent around £300 on books in less than a year since. A £250 Android-based Amazon tablet locked to its app store would blow the market apart.

The lesson for small businesses is to never lose sight of where the money really is. Apple is, as usual, the exception to the rule in that it’s able to make profit from every part of the process – the mistake HP made was to imagine it could duplicate Apple’s success. Bill and Dave, you’re no Apple.

There are surely a host of reasons behind HP’s decision to ditch making consumer products (aside from printers) in favour of business services and software. However, I’m not going to pretend to be in Leo Apotheker’s mind — he’s German, after all (don’t get offended; my mother’s German, and I don’t get her sometimes either).

The decision took many by surprise, not least because HP is the biggest maker of PCs in the world: if it can’t survive in the computer market, where does that leave other companies? Is this the death of the PC? (Personally, I don’t think so, but working for the UK’s finest PC magazine probably means I’m a little bit biased.)

I’m not surprised, however, that the first point in HP’s plan mentions higher margins. If you look at HP’s results, it’s clear where the most lucrative areas are. Rather than make you sift through some entirely dull lists of numbers on a Friday afternoon, I’ve made some pretty interactive images, showing the revenue and profit of different HP divisions, in hundreds of millions of dollars. (Personal Systems Group is the arm that’s set to be spun off.)

While PSG makes the most revenue, it doesn’t make the most profit; no matter how much money HP makes in consumer sales, it keeps as profit just 6%, limiting how much growth it can see. Here are those same departments, organised by profit as a percentage of revenue:

You’ll notice the Software bubble is pretty big — dropping $11.7 billion on Autonomy doesn’t seem entirely silly with that in mind. And notice the PSG bubble is the smallest, so small it can’t hold the division’s full name.

Basically, it pays to make PCs, but it doesn’t pay enough. This is at least partially because of downward pricing pressures on computers, caused by consumers having less money to spend, netbooks driving down prices and competition from potentially more attractive computing products (i.e., tablets).

Low-cost computing

HP isn’t the only one feeling this pain. Dell’s VP of large enterprise in Europe, Stephen Murdoch, told me earlier this week that the company was moving away from lower cost products, and this margin problem is why. Acer is seriously struggling, with analysts pinning that on its focus on the low-end market.

One company that doesn’t have this problem is Apple, which focuses on selling high-end products. While that may lead to complaints the MacBook and its siblings are overpriced, it has helped the company become the top tech firm (by market value, anyway).

One more set of stats, and I don’t think I need to make a chart for this one. In Apple’s last quarterly report, it said gross margins company-wide (including its lucrative iTunes and App Store) were 42%. HP’s, company wide, were 8.1%. Shareholders will look at that and complain, loudly.

Based on all of this, I wouldn’t say the death of the PC is on the way, but it certainly does look like the race to the bottom, spurred by cheap netbooks and economic troubles, did some lasting damage to the market. If you want a cheap machine, buy it now while you still can — as the big players look to improve their margins, they might not bother making them for much longer.

While some low-end Pavilions will still rock the plastic, the higher-end Pavilions are now finished in what HP describes as a ‘Dark Umber’ aluminium finish. It looks great, and feels solid, too.

In keeping with the reasonable asking prices – just £699 inc VAT for the the dv6-6150ea, and £899 for the dv7-6150ea – both utilise the mid-range Core i5-2410M processor. Switchable graphics chipsets also see AMD’s Radeon HD 6490M buddying up with the integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000.

HP’s Beats Audio now comes as standard on both models, and the speakers have been moved around the chassis, with four on the dv6 and six on the dv7. The latter packs in a miniature ’subwoofer’ driver on its base, too, making for a pair of seriously crisp-sounding laptops.

HP has also responded to the complaints levelled at its previous models, so the touchpad has been redesigned from scratch. Gone are the fiddly integrated buttons, replaced by a wide, responsive touchpad and two discrete buttons – a huge improvement. The Scrabble-tile keyboard, meanwhile, is as good as ever.

A careful scout around the new Pavilion’s ports and connectors sees USB 3 makes its debut. All the networking essentials are still present, with Gigabit Ethernet partnered with 802.11bgn and Bluetooth, while a 1.3 megapixel webcam with low-light mode is enough to keep Skype users happy.

A fingerprint reader comes as standard, and HP’s SimplePass software makes light work of securely managing multiple login details. Assign login details to individual fingers, and a single stroke of the finger is all it takes to fire up the browser and automatically log in to your preferred site.

With both models just hitting the shop shelves as you read this, HP’s promised to send us a pair of review units by the end of this week. Keep an eye on the website, and we’ll bring you the full low-down as soon as we can.

Following the heady excitement of LG’s 3D extravaganza, moving on to HP’s tiny Veer might seem a bit of a comedown, but far from it. Of the three devices HP showed-off this morning, it’s the one that had the biggest “oooh” factor.

The reason for this is the way it manages to combine Lilliputian dimensions with build quality akin to a bigger, more grown-up device. The Veer is essentially a shrunken Palm Pre 2. It has a glass-fronted, multitouch capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 320 x 400 pixels, and a physical Qwerty keyboard that slides out with a satisfying thunk.

I’ve had reservations about Pre keyboards before: they’ve always been too inset  for comfort, and surrounded by that infamously sharp plastic rim. But the Veer does away with all that, flattening the keyboard and smoothing the sharp edges a touch, which makes a massive difference. Even on a device measuring 54.5 x 15.1  x 84mm (WDH) and weighing a mere 103g, it feels usable – although having a little nail growth does help with accuracy. Crucially, it’s comfortable to hold while you’re typing away, and that compensates for the lack of wiggle room.

The design of this little phone is lovely, complete with metal buttons and soft-touch plastic hugging the rear and sides. One particularly neat touch is the MacBook-esque magnetic contact found on the right-hand edge, which is used to charge the device and connect the supplied 3.5mm headphone adapter. The Veer is so small, there wasn’t room in the chassis to fit all those physical connections.

Despite the size, though, the Veer is most definitely a fully fledged smartphone, equipped with the latest version of HP’s webOS mobile operating system with all its multitasking capabilities, and it has what looks to be enough grunt to push things along smoothly. The processor is an 800MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 7230, there’s 8GB of storage on board and there’s plenty in the way of connectivity – 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, tri-band HSDPA. From our brief encounter, it certainly looked quick and nippy enough to cope with all the usual smartphone tasks.

There is the odd compromise, though: the 5-megapixel camerara has no flash, and the magnetic adapter means you’ll have to be very careful to look after it to avoid shelling out for another. There’s also no getting around the fact that the screen is tiny. We found the Palm Pixi’s screen cramped when we reviewed it last year, and this is exactly the same size. The battery is small too, with a capacity of only 910mAh. Given the problems we’ve had in the past with battery life on Palm devices that’s a worrying-looking stat.

Having said that, for anyone fed up of their smartphone wearing holes in their trouser pockets, we can see this being an attractive alternative. With seemingly every other manufacturer going bigger and bigger with their smartphones, it’s nice to see one manufacturer lavishing attention in the other direction.

After its announcement last week, this is the first opportunity we’ve had for a hands-on with HP’s WebOS-equipped TouchPad. If you haven’t had the chance to check out the news story covering the announcement, the core details are pretty straightforward.

The TouchPad is a 10in tablet, with a resolution of 1,024 x 768, running a tablet-optimised version of webOS, the mobile operating system HP inherited when it acquired Palm. Under the hood is a meaty dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm 8060 processor, there’s a 1.3-megapixel webcam on the front for making video calls with (but no camera on the rear), and HP will be selling the device in 16GB and 32GB versions. Initially only the Wi-Fi version will be available, but 3G-enabled versions will follow soon after.

So what is it like in the flesh? Well, it’s still four months away from being unleashed on the public, so there’s unsurprisingly the odd creak here and there, but otherwise it’s remarkably polished. There isn’t much to say about the front, other than it’s made from Corning’s scratch- and shatter-resistant Gorilla glass. All you see is the webcam and a small button in the centre of one of its short edges.

The rear panel is subtly curved and finished in polished black plastic, and it already feels up to snuff – it feels solid in the hand and the curved edges and corners make it very comfortable to hold. A quick session with the on-screen keyboard revealed the capacitive touchscreen to be as sensitive as you might expect, and on first impression HP has made a great start on customising the smartphone-focused webOS apps and user interface.

Particularly impressive is the email app, which elegantly presents your messages in a number of different ways: full message view emails take up the whole screen; drag a small handle at the bottom-left corner of the screen and a navigation view is revealed in a panel to the left; drag another handle and all your email inboxes appear in yet another panel. It sounds as if the screen might become crowded, but it doesn’t – especially in landscape mode. Another neat touch is the notifications menu: you can use this to directly browse and manage  emails without having to launch the full email app.

As for third-party apps, HP says “well-written” ones should display just as well on the touchpad screen as they do on the company’s smartphones. However, it says the new Enyo development platform should allow developers to write once and have their apps work just as well across all webOS devices.

As with previous webOS-based devices, the TouchPad handles multitasking beautifully. Hit the button on the edge of the screen and up pops the “card view”, representing the various applications running in the background; sweep left and right and the cards all scroll by, just as smoothly as they do on the Palm Pre 2.

Other notable features include “touch to share”, which uses HP’s next-generation Touchstone technology to transfer information between other webOS smartphones and the TouchPad, simply by resting the phone momentarily on the tablet’s edge. In demonstration we were shown a web page being sent from the TouchPad to the new Palm Pre3 (more on this beauty later on), which was a little underwhelming but HP promises there is “more to come”.

As with the BlackBerry PlayBook, it’s a positive first showing; it’s just a shame we have to wait until the summer for it.

But we’re not here to champion the champions, or lavish praise on the sensible: if you can’t wage bitter recriminations during the festive period, when can you? So, here we present the worst tech decisions of 2010.

RUNNING ANDROID ON TABLETS BEFORE IT’S READY

How best to combat the Apple iPad – a tablet interface that’s so breathtakingly simple that even the BBC’s pre-pubescent, twaddle-talking, F1 presenter Jake Humphrey can master it? The answer: shoe-horn an operating system designed exclusively for smartphones onto tablets and hope nobody notices the difference.

When even Google – the company that designed the operating system – admits Android really isn’t ready for tablets yet, you think people might take note. Yet, that didn’t stop companies such as Samsung, ViewSonic and, erm, clothes retailer Next from plunging in with devices that were just the wrong side of iffy (and in the case of the Next tablet, several counties the wrong side of iffy).

The most telling indictment of Android’s current unsuitability came when editor Tim Danton attempted to find just ten decent apps for our tablets buyer’s guide (on sale at all good newsagents now, folks), and spent the best part of a week swearing at the Android Marketplace, trying to find something other than Angry Birds to recommend.

THE CONVICTION OF PAUL CHAMBERS

Our friendly judicial system failed to see the funny side of a joke made on Twitter in 2010. Not once, but twice. Unfortunately for Paul Chambers, he was in the dock on both occasions.

After discovering his flight was cancelled because of January’s snow storms, the hapless Chambers tweeted: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your s*** together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”

Clearly alert to the fact that Al-Qaeda terrorists routinely announce their plans seven or so days in advance on social-networking sites, police subsequently swooped on Chambers’ house, confiscating his iPhone, laptop and desktop hard drive, and charging him with “sending  a message that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”.

Incredibly, Doncaster Magistrates convicted Chambers under section 127 of the Public Communications Act in May, ordering him to pay more than £1,000 in fines and costs. Even more incredibly, an appeal judge upheld the conviction in November, arguing that “anyone living in this country in the present climate of terrorist threats, especially at airports, could not be unaware of the possible consequences [of their actions].”

The possible consequences for free speech and common sense are even more disturbing.

ICO’s ALL-CLEAR ON GOOGLE WI-FI SCANDAL

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) didn’t exactly cover itself in glory in 2010. When Google confessed that its Street View cars had been accidentally Hoovering up personal data from people’s Wi-Fi connections, the ICO sent a couple of crack investigators in to see what damage had been done. The upshot of their probe? No “meaningful” data had been collected. Rest easy, everybody.

Except a couple of months later, after investigations by other international privacy watchdogs, Google admitted that private emails and passwords were among the jumble of data gobbled up by its Street View cars, raising questions over the competence of the ICO’s initial investigation.

“The ICO seems more Keystone Cops than protector of our civil liberties,” said Conservative MP Robert Halfon, who uncovered a paucity of technical training among the ICO’s staff.

Meanwhile, an exclusive PC Pro investigation revealed the ICO was playing good cop, bad cop with Google: publicly upbraiding the search firm for a “a significant breach of the first principle of the Data Protection Act”, while privately sending chummy emails to Google’s staff bemoaning Halfon’s “misrepresentation” of its investigation.

What use is a watchdog that doesn’t bark, let alone bite?

THE PASSING OF THE DIGITAL ECONOMY BILL

Just ahead of the General Election, many tech-savvy Britons were wondering whether dictatorships were really that bad after all, after no fewer than 189 MPs lent their support to the draconian Digital Economy Bill.

Among the bill’s lowlights were the threat of disconnecting alleged file-sharers without court proceedings, and a clause that requires ISPs to block access to “”a location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright”.

The hastily constructed legislation was rushed through in the “wash-up” before the end of the Parliament, and was debated in an almost empty chamber by MPs who often didn’t have the first clue what they were talking about.

Labour MP Tom Watson, who voted against the Government for the first time, said the matter had left him feeling “physically sick”. He wasn’t the only one.

BOB MUGLIA’S SILVERLIGHT SPEECH

Even before Microsoft’s Bob Muglia took to the stage at October’s PDC, developers were nervous about Silverlight’s prospects. By the time he’d finished, they were positively terrified.

With Apple refusing to allow Silverlight apps onto the iPhone/iPad, and the growing support for HTML5, many felt Silverlight was already being squeezed out of the picture. So when the president of the server and tools division stood up and said, “Our Silverlight strategy and focus going forward has shifted,” developers began to fidget in their seats. “HTML is the only true cross-platform solution for everything, including [Apple’s] iOS platform,” he added, leaving the Silverlight developers crying into their free cappuccinos.

Muglia’s comments reverberated around the tech press and developer forums, with many asking whether Silverlight – which had only recently been chosen as the core development platform for Windows Phone 7 – had been sidelined?

Muglia subsequently posted a blog, admitting that his PDC speech had “caused controversy and confusion” before claiming that “Silverlight is very important and strategic to Microsoft”.

The damage may already have been done.

HP BUYING PALM

Several household names were in the frame when Palm put itself up for sale at the beginning of the year, but HP wasn’t among them. So what convinced HP to emerge from nowhere to pay a staggering $1.2 billion for a firm that was losing money hand over fist?

The Palm Pre was hyped an iPhone killer, but its “stuttering speeds, less-than-alluring hardware package, and occasionally confusing OS” failed to surpass the iPhone, according to our review. The succeeding Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus have done little to shake our conviction, either. Buyers are equally unimpressed: Palm’s webOS commands a mere 1.3% of its home US market, according to the latest figures from Nielsen. It doesn’t even figure in Gartner’s predictions for mobile devices OSes for 2014.

HP says it wants to put webOS in everything from tablets to web-connected printers, but we’ve yet to see a single product announcement (although that may change come CES in January). But starting from such a small a base, will HP be able to convince app developers that it’s worth their while developing for webOS? We very much doubt it.

THE BROWSER BALLOT

Yes, the EU imposed the browser ballot on Microsoft last year and it first started appearing on Windows desktops in October 2009, but the full consequences of the decision wouldn’t be felt until this year –  which is why we’ve included it here.

For those of you who’ve forgotten all about the browser ballot, let me begin… after a decade of making less progress than Bruce Forysth’s fringe, Opera suddenly decided it was Microsoft to blame for its appalling market share on the desktop, not the lack of killer features in its browser.

Somehow the EU bought Opera’s argument, and so ensued the ‘browser ballot’ – a little screen that offers Internet Explorer users a dozen previously unheard of delights such as Maxthon, Sleipnir and, of course, Opera. Most of which are pure gubbins, according to our reviews of the browser ballot contenders.

So, more than a year after the ballot was first introduced, has Opera been vindicated with a tidal wave of users deserting Internet Explorer in favour of the Scandinavian surfing sensation? Not exactly, no. According to Stat Counter Europe, Opera has seen its market share go from 4.05% in October 2009 (when the ballot was introduced) to… wait for it… 4.27% in November 2010. A staggering increase of 0.22%.

To be fair, Internet Explorer’s share has tumbled from 47.78% to 38.91%, but that’s largely due to the emergence of Google Chrome (3.99% in October 2009 to 13.09% in November 2010). And while Chrome is indeed in the browser ballot, we can’t help thinking Google’s massive marketing campaign and the quality of the browser are the real reasons for its success.

Gone is the cool textured grey and silver of the glamorous Envy 14. The new Dr Dre-approved Envy 14 is finished all in matte black, enlivened by red highlights, while a strip of chrome races around the laptop’s edge. It looks damn good, too. The keyboard, each key backlit with a crimson glow, looks absolutely stunning.

In addition to a higher specification than the usual Envy 14, HP’s also bundling some £140-worth of Beats Solo headphones with the package, so the suggested £1300 inc VAT retail price doesn’t sound too ridiculous. Considering that this is a pretty compact laptop – especially compared to the gargantuan Envy 17 sitting alongside – the Envy 14 Beats Edition has some serious power on tap. One of the older quad-core Intel Core i7 processors enters stage left, the i7-720QM, and is accompanied by 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 500GB hard disk and a gaming-capable ATI Radeon 5650 graphics chipset.

There’s a snazzy slot-loading DVD drive – no, no Bluray, even at this price – and three USB ports are scattered around, with one doubling as an eSata port. HDMI and Mini-DisplayPort are present and correct, too.

Dual-band 802.11n wireless networking buddies up with Bluetooth, while Gigabit Ethernet rounds off the networking side of things. A low-light 1.3MP webcam nestles in the super-glossy bezel of the display, which, if you were hoping for some Full-HD action, is just a standard 1,366 x 768 pixel panel. Boo. Hiss.

The really big news, though, is that while the trackpad looks just like the one that we hated so much back in our reviews of the Envy 13 and Envy 15, it’s been transformed. The buttons are still flush with the touchpad’s surface, but this time leaving your thumb poised and ready to click isn’t enough to arrest the mouse pointer’s movement. It may not sound like much, but with superb design, great build quality and performance to die for coming as standard across the range, the trackpad was the Achilles’ Heel of the Envy. Now, however, HP might just be onto a winner.

The criticisms levelled at Hurd over his tenure as CEO include that of stifling innovation in favour of making money. However, since he took the reins in 2005, HP’s market value has more than doubled to roughly $100bn, so those are some big shoes to fill. To quote Motley Fool analyst Rick Munarriz: “Outside of Steve Jobs at Apple, it’s hard to imagine a CEO that is more important to his company than Mark Hurd to Hewlett Packard. He did a massive turnaround job.”

Like me, you’ve probably read the coverage with interest. However, the real talking point now is where does HP go from here?

It has been reported that the vendor will look outside the company for its new CEO. But whoever it chooses, it will undeniably signal the technological direction the firm will take.

While HP’s most like-for-like competitor is currently IBM, the firm faces a new rival in Cisco, which is publicly stepping on HP’s toes in its efforts to conquer the server market. Analysts are even pointing to Apple as an emerging rival, as HP prepares to enter both the tablet and the smartphone market following its acquisition of Palm.

A list of potential successors from all of these companies is already doing the rounds.

For me, Martyn Reynolds, managing VP at Gartner sums up the situation: “The company needs to be recognised by consumers as a cool brand, a company that makes products that you have to have. And there’s no immediate pressure to do this, so the board has time to make the right choice for the future of HP – and its future customers.”

Christine Horton is editor of our sister site Channel Pro