HP to ship up to 48 million notebooks this year

Hewlett-Packard (HP), the world’s largest computer manufacturer, has let it be known that they expect to ship anywhere from 45 to 48 million notebooks this year – where among them include webOS tablet models. This is a pretty impressive figure to work around with, since HP managed to attain total shipments of over 39 million units last year. It is a good thing that the development of webOS tablet PCs was finished last year, and HP will have Taiwan-based Inventec begin ODM production and shipments in March this year so that software testing and timing of launch schedules will be in line with market development. It will be a challenging time for HP regardless where the webOS platform is concerned, since there really isn’t a huge market demand for such devices in the past, so unless something really revolutionary rolls out, we believe the same lack of momentum will apply for the future.