ConsumerIT - For Europe's High Volume PC Retailers, Distributors & Builders

The real news in the HP Q4 2011 results is not whether the company made an overall profit (even if it did). It is how much HP spent on the Palm and webOS businesses-- a sum totalling well over $2 billion.

First off, one has to recall HP spent $1.2BN to buy Palm in the first place back in 2010, before releasing a couple of webOS-powered smartphones and the stillborn TouchPad tablet. Two other numbers emerge from the Q4 2011 results-- $885 million in "impairment of goodwill and purchased intangible assets" tied to webOS and Palm, and $775M relating on the decision to "wind-down the webOS device business."

The result? $1.66 billion, spent on killing off Palm and webOS.

What next for webOS? HP is still looking for a buyer, and Venturebeat says Intel and Qualcomm are still in talks over purchasing the Palm portfolio (at least according to the unnamed sources). However HP demands a caveat-- the license to use webOS in printers. And such a licensing deal is what keeps dragging Palm purchase negotiations on and on.

Maybe HP knows a fabulous secret on the synergy between webOS and printers? Or it has a finished webOS-powered printer awaiting release? We can't imagine "webOS-enabled" ever becoming a unique selling point for printers, but hopefully all will be clear(er) over the next few weeks-- or whenever HP decides the final fate for the Palm experiment.

Go HP Q4 2011 Results

Go As Palm Bidding Continues, HP Wants a Sweet Deal to Keep webOS in Printers (VentureBeat)

Microsoft is a colossus, with sales reaching over $60 billion a year (and growing by 10% Y-o-Y), annual profits totaling $20BN and owning nearly $60BN in cash. But is it really about to collapse due to standing on feet of clay?

This is the belief Silicon Valley big VC firm partners, executives and startup gurus speaking to Business Insider share. How would such a scenario-- a nightmare for Steve Ballmer and co.-- play out?

First off, Apple manages to beat all other vendors to become global PC vendor by H2 2012, as Canalys predicts (keep in mind Canalys forecasts also count tablet numbers). As consumers (and employees) get more and more intimate with Apple hardware and software, enterprise IT departments will also start switching to Apples-- as they already do in the mobile sphere, switching from Blackberries to iPhones and the iPad. RIM tried to enter the enterprise tablet market with the PlayBook, but with very little success.

Printer maker Memjet claims its technology breaks records as far as print speeds are concerned-- saying the Memjet reference colour office printer can print out photo-quality pages at speeds of up to one page per second.

The secret lies in what Memjet calls Waterfall Printhead technology-- printing through a single fixed 8.77" printhead covering the entire width of an A4 sheet of paper with 70400 nozzles (x17 the amount in a regular inkjet) to deposit 774 million dots of ink per second. Being stationary, the system improves performance while reducing the  noise, vibrations and mechanical complexity of traditional inkjet architectures.

The printhead also contains 5 ink channels (with Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and 2 black ink channels as standard colour configuration), with 2 nozzle rows per channel.

The technology impressed Popular Science magazine-- enough to give it a 2011 Best of What's New award.

Memjet is currently looking for both OEM and distribution partners in the home and office printer category, and is also working on ink and software systems.

Go Memjet Home and Office Printers

Go Memjet Honoured With Popular Science Award

Are your customers demanding increasingly smaller PC hardware? The latest VIA pico-ITX might fit their demands-- the ARTiGO 1150, a DIY PC kit packing a dual-core processor in a portable chassis.

Measuring 14.6 x 9.9 x 5.2cm, it carries a 1GHz VIA Eden X2 64-bit dual-core processor, together with HDMI and VGA display connectivity, HD video support, full Gigabit networking, up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, wifi support and x5 USB ports.

It even has space for an optional SD card reader module, as well as a 2.5" SATA HDD or SSD.

Handling video duties is a VIA VX900H media system processor, an all-in-one chipset supporting most HD video formats, including MPEG-2, DivX, WMV9, VC1 and H.264.

VIA suggests a number of applications for the diminutive package-- including home server, media streaming and even surveillance use.

Go VIA ARTiGO 1150 DIY PC Kit