In addition to its new HP RP9 Retail System, HP is also highlighting its HP Pro Tablet 608, which provides an eight-inch screen version of a product HP has offered for years in a ten-inch form factor.
The HP RP9 Retail System
HP Inc. has made an unusual Sunday announcement at the National Retail Federation Convention. Two product sets were unveiled. On the conventional point-of-sale (POS) side, HP has announced its new flagship HP RP9 Retail System, which becomes the first retail POS product with the new Intel Data Protection Technology for Transactions to ship. On the mobile front, the company announced the HP Pro Tablet 608, an eight-inch screen version of a ten-inch screen product that has been on the market for several years.
“At HP Inc., we certainly appreciate the challenges in retail, with the growing empowerment of the customer, and the challenges and opportunities it creates for retail,” said Cory McElroy, director of product management for HP Retail Solutions. “The challenge with an empowered customer is how to level the playing field for the sales associate.”
McElroy said that HP has responded with a higher stake in product design, increasing versatility, and focusing on multipurpose devices and solutions.
“We are investing both in traditional POS and mobility and this announcement is about both,” he said. “From a retail perspective, HP has been growing mindshare, and is now in either the number two or three market position, depending on the analyst. These announcements will help advance that.”
The old HP RP7, with its very different design from the RP9
The HP RP9 Retail System is the replacement for the HP RP7 Retail System, but McElroy stressed that this is more than just a regular cyclical upgrade.
“The RP9 is at the front of new design language we are introducing, which makes it very different from current products,” he said. “It is moving to widescreen, and is very sleek.” The display comes in either a 15.6″ or 18.5″ diagonal size, and features 10-point multi-touch capability and edge-to-edge glass.
“It is also designed to have a five year product lifecycle, to future-proof the investment for the customer,” McElroy said. “In addition, it has high performance scaling up to Core i7, and a broader array of storage options and RAM capacity.” For the OS, there is a choice between Windows 10 Pro, 64-bit and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise.
HP is also touting the RP9’s security.
“We are introducing the industry’s first purpose-built device around Intel’s Data Protection Technology for Transactions,” McElroy said. The new technology creates a secure transaction path that encrypts data while routing it directly from the point of entry to a bank’s servers, to isolate and protect credit and debit information from the moment the retailer initiates the transaction.
HP is bringing its own proprietary security technology into the RP9, making it the first HP terminal with HP BIOSphere’s Sure Start technology. HP Sure Start, which provides self-healing BIOS-level protection in case the BIOS is compromised, was originally introduced in 2013 in HP’s high-end notebooks, but HP is now expanding its use throughout their product portfolio.
“These help keep mission-critical systems protected, and provide utmost protection against malware and intrusion,” McElroy said.
McElroy also highlighted the HP Pro Tablet 608, a new HP mobile POS offering.
The HP Pro Tablet 608
“We had been in this market for the past few years with 10 inch screen solutions based on the ElitePad 1000 [tablet],” McElroy said. “We are now introducing 8 inch solutions to complement the 10 inch story, for use cases where more mobility is required, so the device has a smaller size and weight.”
The HP Pro Tablet 608 checks in at under 1 lb. and is only 8.35 mm thin. It has a Quad-core Intel Atom processor, up to 4GB of memory and either 64 or 128GB of storage.
“We are very excited about the new opportunities the 8 inch form factor introduces,” McElroy stated. “We don’t see it as a ‘one size fits all thing,’ and we expect some retail environments will want both form factors.”
The Pro Tablet 608 is also available with two optional cases developed for traditional retail, retail banking and hospitality customers, which HP is showcasing at NRF. The HP Pro Tablet Mobile Payment Solution is a retail jacket built around the Verifone E55 payment terminal. The HP Pro Tablet Mobile Retail Solution accommodates multi-vendor payment terminals.
“We don’t think the traditional POS checkout will go away, but we do expect it will be increasingly augmented by mobility POS devices,” McElroy said.
