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HP's Slate To Be Replaced By WebOS Tablet?
itwbennett writes "Last week the rumor mill was rumbling about the demise of HP's Slate. 'This past weekend brought fresh rumors to the surface,' writes blogger Peter Smith. 'Now the insiders are saying that the Slate will be reborn as the HP Hurricane, and it will run WebOS. That makes perfect sense given HP's recent purchase of Palm and HP's declaration that they were 'doubling down on WebOS.' More surprising is the rumored launch date of Q3 of this year, which seems like a pretty fast turn-around. Particularly so if HP ditches the Atom and goes with an ARM processor, which Electronista suggests it would have to do.'"
I think it's going to be an also ran against Android and iPhone OS.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
If they're planning on releasing a WebOS tablet, I'm sure they will continue to improve/expand WebOS (by necessity at least to support the larger tablet format). Anything they produce will of course be "their own version" since they now own WebOS. As a Pre owner, I'm happy to look forward to WebOS 1.5 or 2.0.
Could they pick a tackier or more insensitive name?
It could be but lets be fair.
WebOS has a better UI than Android.
WebOS has Multitasking which even iPhoneOS only sort of kinda has.
The one area that WebOS really was weak in was the SDK. The whole "javascript+HTML" thing is very limiting. The new PDK will give you access to C and some real performance and hardware access.
From just a UI point of view WebOS is a better choice than both of those for a tablet.
So maybe it will be a good alternative to both.
You know this desire to have a "Standard" really isn't a good thing. There was a lot of innovation and excitement when we had Apple, Atari, Commodore, Ti, Radioshack, and goodness knows how many others fighting it out.
When IBM came and "created" a standard the standard SUCKED. The 8088 was a terrible CPU with a terrible ISA. Systems like the Atari ST, and Amiga which where cheaper, more powerful, and offered features that MS-DOS wouldn't have for years could never compete.
Do we really want to dismiss alternative this early in a new and important market like the mobile space?
I mean lets be honest it would have been easy to say that the iPhone was going to be an also ran to WinCE/Mobile and PalmOS. I mean look how many devices and applications those OSs had!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I put my money on Palm having a Pre-production (pun intended) version of a WebOS tablet ready to go and just needed a sugar daddy to pay for manufacturing.
HP has probably been playing around with tablet designs... Palm has probably been playing around with tablet designs...
I doubt if it would take too much effort to grab one of those designs, shine it up a bit, and throw it into production. Even if they have to switch to a different CPU.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
The IBM PC was more powerful than other systems at the time, and the 8088 was probably the highest performance/$ processor available, and had a better ISA than the 6800 series CPUs, IMNSHO. IBM didn't force anyone to buy PCs; they caught on because they were more powerful and reasonably priced. The 68000 was far too expensive at the time, and the inexpensive systems using it, the Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari ST, didn't arrive for another 4 years. By this time, the compelling reason to buy a PC or clone was for the huge software library.
I think it was obvious from the start that the Palm acquisition was all about WebOS and tablets, not smart phones. Anyone else see this purchase and cancelation of Slate as a huge setback for Microsoft? It's basically a public admission by HP that Windows can't cut as a tablet OS.
HP just broke their direct dependence on Microsoft for an emerging market for a good reason: Microsoft's failure to produce an innovative user interface for tablets.
WebOS doesn't run the best on the Palm Pixi. Dropping down to an older gen CPU with a slower clockspeed would probably be nearly unusable, especially with the low RAM of those older devices. Even if this did happen, the performance would be poor and they'd have to disable things that really MAKE the OS, such as multitasking....
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Right. Because, you know, a company that sells hardware is going to spend tons of cash porting WebOS to a 5 year old PDA.
This makes no sense. You really expect content developers to spend money creating an hardware/OS specific version of their apps for each device?
There will be a common, cross-platform runtime, because the people who pay for content creation want one.
I have an MSI Wind all in one touch screen PC running Windows 7, and I understand perfectly why HP dumped Windows 7: it wasn't built for touch interfaces, period. The simple task of logging into the touch screen PC is a monster task, stuff like right click is clumsy, some gestures are all right but it's not made for touch screen. Also, a lot of interface elements are just too damn tiny, good luck selecting a tiny arrow from a drop down button that is about 22 x 22 pixels with arrow being about maybe 4 pixels. We pretty much stopped using the touch interface for our kitchen computer and just have a wireless mouse close by, and we don't do complex tasks on it, mainly some web surfing, online videos and XBMC.
I am pretty sure HP had other reasons too, possible battery life, need for more memory and storage, but I think the main reason for the dump was the awful interface. When you compare Windows 7 touch interface with other OSes, it is like comparing a Russian Lada (Win7) to a Bugatti Veyron (iPhone/Chrome/Android/WebOS).
Uhh, you're talking about a pen based interface, not touch. Get it right.
Also Windows XP was horrible for Tablets, I know, I had one.
Without a lot of work I just don't see Android or WebOS as a competitor against the iPad. About the most they can hope for is to be a cheaper alternative which may get sales but will still leave them as also-rans. People that buy a Visio tv from Walmart would buy them but would lust for an iPad. The iPad is buggy and the available software is mostly inflated iPhone apps and buggy, if you can find it at all, just released stuff and I still love the darn thing. You can just feel the potential radiating from the thing. I've yet to see any other brand of slate anywhere near as sexy and half of that is the well thought out interface. I'd love to see Android and WebOS kick up the competition but they need their own Steve Jobs to throw out all the garbage and force them to take real shape. Someone with some sense of style and usability that is okay with being a jerk and telling people to go do it again over and over and over again. (That is what most software projects need.) I always liked id's "When it's ready." motto. Make me wait but make it worth waiting for.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Yeah - so I think the rest of us will avoid the nerdpad and stick to nice devices based off user-friendly designs such as iPhone OS and maybe even webOS and Android (although they, especially Android, has a touch of the nerdpad still there).
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.