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.'"

Comments

Last Week

[TheKidWho]

Last week the rumor mill was also discussing WebOS tablets. This isn't a new shocking development, this was pretty much expected the moment they bought Palm.

Palm already had tablet ready for production

[ArhcAngel]

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 Hurricane?

[Darth Snowshoe]

Could they pick a tackier or more insensitive name?

Re:HP Hurricane?

[Renderer of Evil]

In their defense, Dell had already secured the name to Gulf Oil Spill Tablet. It was either Hurricane or HP Malaria.

Re:HP Hurricane?

[AVryhof]

They should have just stuck with the iPaq name ...I bet that would have really pissed Apple off, because they wouldn't be able to do jack about the use of it, considering iPaq ws already used for an earlier generation product well before the iPad was even dreamed up.

Re:WebOS? Intermeresting...

[LWATCDR]

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!

Dear HP

[fredrickleo]

Dear HP,

Please release a WebOS rom/image/update/etc for all the Palm TX's and other Palm devices that are already out there but probably not being used on account of stagnant OS software and applications.

I believe many of these devices are capable of running WebOS and you could create a community almost overnight. I'm sure I'm not the only geek looking at my TX wishing I could use it in some meaningful capacity again.

Re:Dear HP

[medcalf]

I'm just amused at the image of the business meeting where that would be proposed. I had a director once whose reaction would have been: "That's very interesting, out-of-the-box thinking. Now get back in the box!"

Re:Dear HP

[ProppaT]

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....

What HP's Palm Purchase Really Means

[d3xt3r]

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.

*nix wins on mobile

[fermion]

The upshot of all this seems to be that MS, and really full proprietary software in general, has long the mobile market. After all these years of being told that OSS software is dangerous, inefficient, and defective, we are at a point where the mobile phones mostly run on software on which at least some layers are at least derived from OSS. Even Nokia, which is suing the hell out of anyone that looks at it funny, has Symbian and Qt.

Which leaves RIM, which has good solution for business and has a large market of consumers who want to look like important business people, and the dwindling share of Windows Mobile, some reports indicate a 50% drop in market share since fall of last year.

The fact that iPhone is more closed that some people want causes pain, but would you rather have a company like MS suing everyone that uses OSS software on the mobile platform? I think we can just celebrate that with Google and Apple producing good products using OSS, we can stop wasting time on the Open versus Proprietary debate, and just produce many different good products from which people can choose.

Re:After using an iPad for a week

[norminator]

I never understood why Balmer acted like anyone should care that he was introducing the Slate, when tablets had failed for years, and this was just another one (other than the fact that he was trying to preempt the iPad announcement). Now, the irony is that the tablet that he introduced to the world has turned to vapor before it could be released, and MS's lame attempt to steal Apple's thunder is being reborn in a device that may actually steal some thunder from Apple and a lot of thunder from MS, running a non-MS operating system (the only way it can really work right as a tablet).

I'm sure Balmer would like to pretend that it doesn't exist now. I'm looking forward to reading his dismissive comments about it (the sure sign that it's going to be a success) after it's officially announced.

Re:Maybe you can help me.

[jmac_the_man]

Oh, and it comes with embedded corn by default.

It's called a microkernel.

Re:Meh

[GilliamOS]

It's a damn tablet! Not every bloody piece of technology is supposed to be able to have something to do with Linux. You want Linux on your tablet? Too bad, go buy a Netbook. You Linux users get right on my nerves most of the time: 'Is this microwave open standards compliant?' 'Is this toaster open source?' 'Does anybody know where I can get a Linux compatible table lamp?' 'Has anyone tried installing Linux on an alarm clock?' I tells you it never ends!

Re:More excited for Android tablet.

[gobanjoboy]

They are both built on top of Linux. I agree with you, that Android feels more like a Winmo style interface. I find WebOS to be more elegant and less computer like.

WebOS SDK/PDK supports : HTML5(HTML/css/javascript) | c/c++
Andriod SDK/NDK supports : Java | c/c++


I can at least say that WebOS is super easy to develop for.

Re:Microsoft?

[dc29A]

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).

Re:WebOS? Intermeresting...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used a Palm Pre, it's UI is slick, intuitive and a joy to use.

Then I tried to get an SSH client, there isn't one as far as I could tell. I thought "oh that's fine I'll use VNC web access" but then remembered it's implemented as a Java applet. The browser sucked, Gmail got stuck in infinite reloading loops when it wasn't outright crashing the browser (to be fair it didn't crash the OS). I tried finding an application repository, no joy. I tried an h.264 video, no support. I looked at developing for it, then found I couldn't use programming languages, I was forced to cludge together "applications" with document mark up languages. I gave up.

I'll stick to Android. (iPhone works but you can't help but feel like your taking it up the ass from some guy in a turtle neck)

Re:WebOS? Intermeresting...

[LWATCDR]

Not really. The 8088 in the PC was clocked at only 4.77 MHZ by that time multiple vendors where shipping Z-80s that where clocked at 6 or even 8 MHZ. The larger address space really didn't come in to play at that time since the PC ships standard with 16k and maxed out at 256k. Also 6502s at two to three Mhz where also available.
I would also say that the it is arguable that the x86 ISA was better then the 6809.
The 68000 was available at that time and frankly would have been fine at the HUGE price point that IBM introduced the PC.
The Amiga and ST where every bit the match in performance for the much more expensive AT.
The PC sold because of IBMs name. I was there and everybody thought IBM==computers.
The PC was a TERRIBLE standard but one we got stuck with.

Re:Microsoft?

[TheKidWho]

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.

Re:Obligatory

[MikeFM]

I'm sure somebody will say it and mean it. It's pretty funny that geeks think that way. It just shows how disconnected they are from what the average consumer wants. With all the bitching about the iPad I've decided that what the average geek wants is a Model M keyboard with a green on black screen that sticks awkwardly from the top so everyone can see they are running Linux. It'd probably have a separate battery that hung from their belt and connected by a thick rubber cord. Half of them wouldn't know how to do anything useful but they could feel proud that the device is fully opensource and be happy that everyone could see how uber elite they are. They'd try to get their grandma to switch to their nerdpad because she wouldn't have to use any nasty user-friendly multi-touch interfaces controlled by the man. And they'd probably wank to ascii porn.

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).