HP's exclusive Mobile Internet Ubuntu skin not so exclusive anymore
By Paul Miller 
posted February 13th 2009 8:12AM
posted February 13th 2009 8:12AM
[Via Ars Technica]
posted February 13th 2009 8:12AM
A look back on popular stories from today in a specific year.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
Welcome screen looks cool, not sure about those Open Office icons though :/
those are standard when you have a dark theme, I know they are so ugly...
This concept supports my contention that computer companies should distinguish themselves by making their own operating system, even if it's a re-purposed Linux distro. This whole let's-make-beautiful-computers-and-slap-Windows-on-it, isn't a strategy that's really working for HP.
A lot of people just look at something cheaper from Dell, that's running the exact same operating system, and say, why the heck should I pay more for HP?
"isn't a strategy that's really working for HP."
really? Looking at their marketshare, i'd say the strategy works just fine
Profitability is more important than market share and HP has been fighting with Dell for the lower end market for years now. Their market cap is stuck in 85 billion dollar range, while companies like Microsoft and Apple have been in the 200 to 400 billion range at various times.
Yes Paul if HP and Dell etc created their own Linux variant how much would it cost to develop and how much to support ?
The reason they all use Windows is buying huge amounts of OEM windows licenses is significantly cheaper than developing a brand new OS yourself, and why invest that kind of money in something that is open source and you can't patent.
Same argument about cost applies with macs too I have mac os running in a tri-boot with Win7 and Vista on my own build PC, why should I pay extra for a mac ? XBench puts my £250 system between a MacbookPro & an iMac, the reason for paying more again ?
The other short answer is you don't pay more for HP compared to Dell they both have budget, midrange and high end products.
MS makes double the profit compared to their gross as Apple as does, according to their last financial statements.
Why share uninformed opinions Paul, still not got a job yet ?
Dude, you just answered your own question. You pay more for Macs because it takes lots of money to develop your own operating system. When you buy a Mac, your software is automatically subsidized by the hardware premium.
This is the primary reason why companies like Psystar shouldn't be allowed to clone Macs. They're basically robbing Apple of their hardware sales without having paid anything to develop the OS.
Paul A. Chapel or should I say Gaylord M. Focker
Maybe Apple should sell their OS then?
@Paul
Can you provide any facts to back up your assertations? Here are the facts:
http://www.dvhardware.net/article32660.html
Global Market Share, Q4 2008
HP: 19.1% (+0.4%)
Dell: 13.2% (-1.0%)
Acer: 12.3% (+2.8%)
Lenovo: 7.1% (-0.4%)
Toshiba: 4.7% (+0.8%)
HP not only leads, but grew market share.
HP
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AHPQ
Q4 Total Revenue $33,603.00M
Q4 Net profit margin 6.29%
http://www.google.com/finance?q=Dell
Q4 Total Revenue $15,162.00M
Q4 Net profit margin 4.79%
I could not find detailed 10-Q filings on either company for Q4 of 2008, so numbers cannot be broken out for how much revenue desktops and mobile devices provide. Neither disclosed net profits on those two business units in past filings.
Based upon these facts, how did you draw your conclusion? Anecdotal evidence is lacking, so please point us to some metrics.
What if they bought, let's say, licenses instead of MS? I mean, they wouldn't have to develop anything, nor provide much support, since Suse would, and they can make something like this Mi thing to make it more brand-oriented. I mean, wouldn't a SUSE license costs less than a Windows license?
People pay more for HP because they know that a Dell would overheat and melt the CPU. HP also allows you to use more RAM thsn the Dell netbooks.
If its open source, then how is it a mod? shouldnt all linux users be able to use this via the source code?
Don't know about other distros, but Ubuntu doesn't ship build-essentials by default.
I don't think it should even ship gcc.
Jeez I'm so fed up with these Linux skins. Maybe they could unity the troops and make a desktop environment that works, without having users to file bugreports which aren't read anyway. Oh, and a stable API/ABI would also be nice, one that doesn't brake my software on every update. Oh, and an auto-update feature that doesn't auto-update when I select "no auto updates". Also nice would be a few real apps, not the 500th minesweeper or that wonderful OpenOrifice which doesn't seem to work if you actually need to have something done.
@Errorkid: When was the last time you used Linux? I'm guessing it wasn't in the past few years. There are tons of stable APIs... you most likely picked a "cool" looking one or a fairly newer one if you are getting that situation. And as far as updates... I haven't a clue what you're talking about. An auto-update... that you don't want to auto-update? There are plenty of "real apps". You need to turn off the games filter in synaptic.
@Errorkid
isn't the differences that make everything better, you know competing concepts.
HP MediaStyle application, is just Elisa
I looked though and the forum
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1021351&page=5
#42 is the Harbour-Launcher Installation instructions, sweet I'm going to try this soon, though I'm sure the novelty will where off in a week.
Andir3.0, my last version was 8.10 - not years ago. Contrary to most users I did my comp. sc. thesis on it, so you could consider me as someone who used it pretty intensely.
- OpenOffice breaks the output when you use more than basic text and markup. Formulas turn up messed up. The open-source myth of OO doesn't hold up, there are only a few dozen people working on it for the moment and they're from Sun. Once the polish is done nobody's interested in it and bugs remain unresolved. Opening and closing OO documents over a period of a few hours leaves behind memory which isn't cleaned up.
- Java/C++ programming: the only programming environment which is not from the 80's on Ubuntu is netbeans. I tried the 6.x versions a couple of times, but these just grind the system to a halt. The 5.x worked fine until you write something bigger than a "hello world" ... once the cache gets consumed the system crumbles
- wifi constantly breaking
- tons of stable API's ? You've never programmed something that uses sound/mouse, have you? Oh wait, let me guess ... you're relying on those wrapperclasses? Have fun debugging in a few months.
And please don't bother typing "give it time". I've been on Linux & Unix systems for about 12 years. They're always lagging behind a few years. There's zero innovation, everything which is considered groundbraking is copied from other systems or brought in by the corporate world.
Errorkid, I have to give you a standing ovation, because you have illustrated much of the annoyances I have experienced with Linux over years.
I haven't used Linux quite as long as you have (I started using Linux on and off at around 2002-ish), but I have used many distributions over the years. It's not refreshing to see that many annoying, and obvious issues still remain that should have been fixed years ago. You would think that in the year 2009, all Linux distros would be able to properly detect your resolution. But no, and the worst part is, with MANY distributions, if you try to use the GUI to resize your resolution, it won't let you go any bigger than 800x600. I mean, you would THINK that by NOW, they would allow the user to choose screen resolution sizes that "might" go outside the bounds of the display just in case the X server was not capable of properly detecting the resolution, but NO. You need to edit the xorg.conf file and manually add the entries in.
I too, also experience the "automatic updates disabled yet still runs" problem in more than one Linux distribution.
With regards to programming, honestly, I don't know how developers even make Linux applications. Linux has the worst selection of IDE's available. I found that Eclipse sucks the least out of all of them. I have yet to see an IDE on Linux match Visual Studio in terms of performance, stability, features, and ease of use. KDevelop tries to mimmick VS, but the interface is very clunky and is easy to get lost in.
Ultimately, I have to agree. Just about everything in Linux (with few exceptions) have been done before by other operating systems, and have been done better.
"but it's free, so we won't look a gift theme in the resource files"
Wow... nice.
im liking the interface..simple/smooth