14 DAY TRIAL // Despite Apple’s recent acquisition of Beats Electronics, device manufacturer HP announced this week that it would continue to implement the Beats Audio technology within its products until 2015.
So as a company’s spokesperson confirmed in an email, HP will be allowed to keep making Beats Audio throughout the year. Furthermore, the tech giant will continue to be selling products bearing the Beats Audio logo by 2015, reports CNET.
Currently, 15 to 20% of the products pertaining to the HP lineup come equipped with Beats Audio, and as we already know and the company official has confirmed to us, we’re going to see a whole lineup of products bundling the technology to be launched throughout 2014.
Not so long ago, it was revealed Apple had plans for acquiring Beats Audio and Beats Electronics for the sum of $3 billion / €2 billion. But until now the future of HP’s relationship with Beats has been pretty foggy.
It was speculated as being highly unlikely that Apple will allow HP to continue its relationship with Beats after the acquisition.
Since the two companies compete head to head in the laptop and desktop market, and Beats was one of the unique features the HP product lineup brought to the table, Apple was expected to make efforts to dissolve the bond created between the two companies.
But for the time being, the question of what will happen to HP Beats-enabled products has been answered. Customers will be able to pick up laptops, desktops and tablets with Beats Audio through 2015, after which the company will have to look into forming other partnerships in order to deliver special features to its products.
Anyhow, speaking of HP’s upcoming line-up, you might recall that earlier this month the upcoming HP Slate7 Beats Special Edition tablet has surfaced.
After some digging around, the slate was actually revealed to be a variant of NVIDIA’s Tegra Note 7 in red with Beast Audio embedded.
For now we can’t tell you exactly what the Special Edition moniker entails, but the tablet will come equipped with an NVIDIA Tegra 4 quad-core processor clocked at 1.8GHz fitted with 1GB of RAM and backed up by 16GB of internal storage.
The rumored price for the unit is $320 / €234, which is a bit more than what the Tegra Note 7 usually costs, so maybe HP is planning to throw in something extra, like maybe Beats headphones or a free subscription to Beats Music. Time will tell if this is the case or not.