Revenue for commercial or business PCs fell 4 percent, and for consumer machines it was off 13 percent, but Whitman saw the bright side.

“Against the backdrop of overall PC market contraction in the fourth calendar quarter, we gained 1.4 points of market share in PCs over the prior year, including a 4.6 point gain in the U.S.,” Whitman said Thursday night. She also cited the company’s new EliteBook Revolve convertible, ElitePad 900 as well as its new Google Chrome-based notebook as reason for optimism going forward.

After Whitman’s opening remarks, Raymond James analyst Brian Alexander pressed her on PSG, noting that its profits were off  50 percent year over year.

“We are committed to this business,” Whitman said in response. “We are going to compete on differentiation, whether that is form factors, increased focus on mobility, a multi-OS strategy, multi-chip strategy, frankly relevant to various industries, we’ve got great response to our ElitePad 900 that can be customized by industry and then services.”

She also acknowledged that pricing will be “problematic and quite competitive … but we think we can manage that.”

HP has wavered on whether it would keep or jettison various businesses over the past year. Its proxy statement in December noted that the company would consider selling off or divesting some businesses as needed. So, given that the company had broached — then retracted a possible PC business spin-off once before — that got tongues wagging again.

This news comes just weeks after PC and server rival Dell announced plans to go private – news which prompted HP to put out its own comments inviting Dell’s customers to avoid the uncertainty of a leveraged buyout and jump ship to Hewlett-Packard.

Given Whitman’s statement of support for this margin-stressed business unit, HP is either in it for the foreseeable future, or talking it up to enhance its value to a potential suitor. Hey, you’ve got to wonder, right?

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“There is no way we can compete with those marketing dollars,” says Vishria, CEO of the company. So instead, they had to think creatively and find a new opportunity. And that opportunity, he thinks is on iPad. A recent study by JD Power points to tablet owners spending “7.5 hours per week browsing the Internet, watching videos, listening to music and reading books while on PC they spend 9.6 hours per week” doing the same thing.

The company is announcing a new iPad app, that essentially is a browser optimized around the touch and tablet experience.

“The browsing experience on the tablets essentially is the same as the desktop,” he says. Howes argues that just as the emergence of simpler visual interfaces helped personal computers get better, today we need to present a different visual metaphor for browsing. Typing a URL in the URL bar is essentially the C-prompt of the web, Howes added. The touch and visual nature of the iPad commands a more visual experience, and that is why they have built like a browser-as-a-reader that uses Pinterest-like boxes in a grid. It reminds me of Neiman Lab’s Fuego social reader.

How good is it really?

I have been using RockMelt’s new iPad app for a couple of days and while it delivers on what the company promises, it is still rough around the edges. You have an option to use the app in a non-logged in mode, but that allows you only to search and use pre-configured content packages. These packages include topics such as Design, Food, Sports and, of course, technology news. There are many sources within these packages. And you can search by typing your search query just as you do in Chrome or Safari.

However, RockMelt is more useful when you are logged into the browser using either your Twitter or Facebook account. I am a little annoyed by the amount of information RockMelt wants from Facebook and it makes me queasy. However, if you sign in, you are presented a lot of content that is shared by people who are in your social graph.

The content, which appears like a grid, comes with a bunch of what the company calls, emoti-actions such as Like, Want, LOL, WTF and so on. You can also share the stories via Twitter and Facebook. When you click on an article, it pops up in a plain white “reader” window much like it does on Flipboard or when you hit “Reader View” on Safari browser. The reading experience is pretty damn good, except if you are a publisher, then you are out of luck — Rockmelt totally strips out all ads. I feel the product needs to be smoother and they need to eliminate rough edges. Nevertheless, it is worth a try.

Interestingly, they have snuck in the follower-following model into their browser and it seems that they are building their own “interest graph” around content. I think it is a smart move. Also, in the beta version of the software I saw a way for promoted content to be injected into the grid — a very natural and sound way of attracting advertising dollars.

Web vs. the apps

When I asked Vishria if they were now competing with Flipboard, he said no: “Flipboard is targeting a more magazine style experience.” For me, however, they are pretty much in the same bucket because they are going after the attention we accord to reading time.

Vishria argues that since the web reading experience and our journeys on the web are highly individual and personal, that is one of the reasons why people should use RockMelt. It keeps traditional browsing behavior in place, while offering folks a new way to visually surf the ever-increasing amount on the Internet.

Fair point. Now the big challenge for Vishria and Howes is to find millions of people who are interested in using their browser-app.

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You can download the extension from the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, it sends “news articles, blog posts and other web content” to Kindle, removing advertising and other distractions. You can also preview text before you send it or send only selected text on a page.

I tested “Send to Kindle” versus Pocket on my Kindle Touch and iPad. I sent this Pinterest iPad app article by my colleague Eliza Kern and this YouTube video about a cat and a tortoise to both.

Send to Kindle on iPad

Send to Kindle

On Kindle Touch: The Pinterest article arrived on Kindle Touch within a minute. The formatting looks good, with pictures obviously rendered in black-and-white. Links are intact and work in Kindle Touch’s experimental web browser.

The video does not work on Kindle Touch. It pulls all the text and still photos from the YouTube page.

On Kindle for iPad: Pictures in an article render in color and break up the flow of the text. (See screenshot, right.) This is also a problem in Pocket, but the design’s a little better.

Pocket on iPad

Pocket

On Kindle Touch: The process for getting Pocket articles onto a Kindle e-reader is not super-easy. You have to download your reading list into free ebook management tool Calibre. Then you can send the file wirelessly to Kindle using Amazon’s Send to Kindle desktop version or email it to your Kindle email address.

Once you’ve done this, though, the reading process is great: Calibre compiles all of the articles into a magazine-like format that is easy to read on your Kindle. (If you use Instapaper, the process is easier — learn how to do it here.) So you can keep all of your articles in one “magazine” instead individually downloading them and storing them as separate files on your Kindle, the way you do with Send to Kindle.

Pocket supports the saving of videos, but you won’t be able to watch them on a Kindle Touch.

On Pocket for iPad: Easy and looks great when you have the Pocket iPad app installed. You can save all kinds of content, not just text. So I can watch my cat and tortoise video just fine.

Which one should you use?

The Send to Kindle Chrome browser extension is a good way to send text and articles to your Kindle e-reader quickly. If you want to get a single long article onto your Kindle, I’d go with the Chrome extension. But if you want to read many articles together in a magazine-like format, I really like Pocket, and I wish Kindle would  let you send a whole reading list, not just a single article.

If you primarily use Kindle for iPad, you shouldn’t use the Send to Kindle extension. Use a read-it-later service like Pocket or Instapaper instead. They render text and graphics better, and Pocket lets you save video, not just text.

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Google’s online store has a Chrome Watch Set that includes one timepiece and two straps. Feeling blue? There’s a watchband to match your mood. Gray skies above? Pop the Chrome watch face in the matching band. Instead of numbers, you’ll see a dozen small Chrome logos; with the largest being at 3, 6, 9 and 12. And while the Chrome watch – like the new Android browser –doesn’t support Flash, it could be described as flashy.

I like the concept, but I’m a little disappointed. Having grown up when everyone was wearing Mickey Mouse watches, wouldn’t it be great if there was an option to have Vic Gundotra’s arms pointing out the time?

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In this short video overview, you can get a sense for the new browser. I’ve already made it the default browser on my Galaxy Nexus because it renders text much better and also because of the web page syncronization feature. Note that Chrome for Android is in beta for Android 4.0 devices only; this won’t work on smartphones or tablets without Ice Cream Sandwich.

Note: In the video I said that the Galaxy Nexus stock browser has benchmarked faster. That was an inadvertent mistake as I confused the Nexus results with my Galaxy Tab 7.7 here.

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The fact that Chrome will be limited to just about 1 percent of Android devices is a disappointment, but we should see Chrome proliferate on more smartphones and handsets as devices are upgraded to Android 4.0 and consumers buy new Ice Cream Sandwich hardware. The Android version of Chrome features a re-imagined tab system, fast browsing using one finger flicks and auto complete for searches and URLs. Chrome will pre-load sites it thinks you may visit. And there’s also a new system of previewing links by zooming in, making it easier to click-through.

Because its connected to a Google sign-in, users can get their personalized browsing experience transferred to their phone. That means you can see open tabs and synced bookmarks from the desktop version transferred over to Android. There’s also support for incognito mode so cookies and other data are not saved during a session. Chrome will not handle plug-ins including support for Flash.

The plan all along was to bring Chrome and Android together but Google found it tough to pull off. It finally made a breakthrough with the combination of the improved software in Ice Cream Sandwich and better hardware. That makes it unclear how many older Android devices if any will be able to get the Chrome browser. Google made do with a stock Android browser, which got smarter over time but it was never appropriate to call it a Chrome browser because it wasn’t based on the open-source foundation of Chrome.

Now, Google has a much more robust browser that can compete against third-party browsers such as Dolphin. And Google has a better way to position Android against iOS and its Safari browser. This could also eventually provide a boost for the desktop version of Chrome, which is growing quickly but still trails behind Explorer. For Google users, this is a good reminder of why it’s helpful to stick with Android.

Android users with Ice Cream Sandwich can download the browser in Android Market. Google plans on baking the browser into the operating system for upcoming Android 4.0 devices in the coming months.

It’s nice to see Chrome finally make its way to Android, more than three years after the two debuted. It’s going to have limited effect initially because of the small footprint of Ice Cream Sandwich. But it shows that Google still has ways to keep improving Android and make it even more polished and usable, a big priority with Android 4.0. IOS users may not be swayed as much since iOS 5.0 provided some improvements to the Safari browser, including Reading List and tabbed browsing for the iPad. But overall, it’s a good sign for consumers that they’re getting more robust browsing experiences on mobile devices, which is important as consumers spend more and more time accessing online services from their smartphones and tablets.

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Updated: According to a number of reports, Google has been promoting its Chrome browser through a sponsored-post marketing campaign that appears to break — or at least bend — many of the search company’s own rules about “good” web content. The web giant has also come under fire recently for removing a Google+ avatar belonging to TechCrunch writer-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler, which was apparently judged to be offensive, even though similar content routinely appears in search results. As Google tries to move farther away from being just a search company, it continues to trip over its own feet.

The Chrome promotion, which was first highlighted by SEO Book, involves sponsored blog posts that link to the company’s browser download page and also include a video about Chrome’s supposed benefits for small businesses. As Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land notes, the campaign is a great example of the kind of spammy, low-quality content that Google has repeatedly declared war on via tweaks to its algorithms — including the recent Panda update, which penalized sites such as the New York Times-owned About.com and “content farm” Demand Media for their mediocre content. As Sullivan puts it:

That’s perhaps the bigger problem with this campaign, much more disturbing to me. Google’s paying to produce a lot of garbage, the same type of garbage that its Panda Update was designed to penalize.

The company that Google contracted to run the campaign said the Chrome promotion is a fairly standard program, and that one sponsored post which included a link without the “no follow” tag — a key requirement made by Google so that sites don’t try to game its algorithm in order to achieve a higher Page Rank — was simply a mistake. But even so, the fact that the entire campaign seems intended to deliver spammy results from sites to boost Chrome’s profile makes it look like a perfect example of the kind of content that Google keeps penalizing everyone else for producing. So will Chrome be penalized in search results the way others have been?

Update: Google has told Search Engine Land that it will lower the PageRank of the Google Chrome page for at least 60 days as a result of the marketing campaign.

Does Google delete offensive content or not? That depends

In the MG Siegler incident, the TechCrunch blogger included a humorous profile picture on his Google+ account with his middle finger extended, and then wrote about how this avatar was removed by Google for breaching its rules. MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson argued that this was perfectly understandable, and that social networks need to make these kinds of judgements so that they don’t “turn into a cesspool… sorta like MySpace was,” but others — including author Jeff Jarvis — said Google was playing a dangerous game by excluding some forms of content, since this slippery slope could lead to concerns about its search results as well.

Those search results in turn could be part of the reason why Google is so concerned about Google+ content, as Danny Sullivan notes. Since pages — and avatars — from the social network are now showing up prominently in search, as Google integrates its new offering into all of its properties, the company is undoubtedly a lot more interested in controlling what kind of content appears. And yet, as Siegler pointed out, photos almost identical to the one he posted appear in Google’s search results all the time.

These two incidents may seem silly or inconsequential, and in many ways they are. After all, who cares whether MG Siegler has a photo of himself giving people the finger on his Google+ profile? And the Chrome campaign could just be a sloppy marketing program that was outsourced to the wrong company. But they both highlight for me how Google is trying to have its cake and eat it too: it wants to force other content producers to adhere to the purest standards, but apparently makes an exception when it comes to marketing its own products, and it seems to have one principle for content on its own social network and another for content in its search results.

The reality is that attempting to manage multiple lines of business that in some cases conflict with each other — like the world’s dominant search engine and a growing social network — is going to be an ongoing problem for the company, regardless of what happens in these two specific cases. If Google isn’t careful, they could even become part of a much bigger problem: namely, the antitrust investigation into the company’s behavior around search results and favoritism towards its own properties.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Mark Strozier and Woodley Wonder Works

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Rob Chandhok, SVP, Qualcomm

When it comes to mobile browsers, WebKit has fast become the de facto technology for most big smartphone platforms. From red-hot Android to astonishing iOS to beleaguered Symbian and Blackberry, they have all turned to WebKit for their mobile browsing needs. You wouldn’t be remiss in assuming that Apple and Google are WebKit’s biggest champions — because they are. These days, WebKit has a new best friend, San Diego-based chip maker Qualcomm.

In a conversation earlier this week, Rob Chandhok, SVP of software strategy for the San Diego-based chip company, said that now his crew is one of the largest “committers” to the open-source browser project, and they’re putting resources into Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, as well. The support of WebKit is part of the company’s strategic decision of embracing open web technologies and championing the open-source software, he said.

Qualcomm isn’t doing this through the goodness of its heart; the company realizes it needs to help nurture HTML5. Qualcomm, Chandhok pointed out, wants to make it easy to access system-level components such as the graphics processor (GPU), GPS, compass and camera in the browser for web-based apps. Chandhok hopes the company can allow HTML5 apps to come into their own, and much like the wired web, turn the browser into the center of mobile internet experience versus the so-called native apps. “HTML5 and the browser will win over time. Maybe not this year, but it will happen,” he said.

As Rob pointed out, HTML5 apps help app developers easily overcome the fragmentation challenges of Android and issues that come up with developing for multiple mobile platforms. “We had fragmentation problems in the early days of Brew (a Qualcomm-owned OS) because we didn’t have no leverage in the early days,” Chandhok said.

When I asked him about the possibilities with HTML5 apps, he pointed out that “the Amazon cloud reader is a good starting point.” WebKit isn’t the only software initiative for the chip giant, however. “In order for us to be a platform, we need to have software along with our silicon,” Chandhok said. The company today has more than 5,000 employees devoted to its software efforts and is said to be one of the most active contributors to the Android ecosystem. If Qualcomm is reticent to share any details, it’s because the company also sells silicon to people who make non-Android devices.

Chandhok isn’t too shy to admit that the more folks use the mobile internet and the higher their expectations for HTML5 apps, the more likely they are to buy smartphones with better processors, bigger screens and higher-speed capabilities. And all that means more demand for their chips.

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