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HP Confirms Slate To Run WebOS
Kilrah_il writes "After HP bought Palm a few weeks ago, many rumors emerged regarding the new parent company's plans to further expand the scope of devices running WebOS. Now it appears that at least one of the rumors is true: The Slate will be running WebOS. 'Today an HP exec has confirmed that the company is developing a WebOS tablet which should be available by October.'"
Tablets have been running full OS versions for years and they failed. Two thumbs up for HP figuring this out and moving forward with a proper touch based OS on their tablet.
If people were so serious about buying Windows based slates, the sales of "Tablet PCs" wouldn't have been sucking for the last decade.
Also, "WebOS" implies that its UI layer is based on web technologies, not that it is browser-only. Support for local applications is pretty much exactly the same as Android. And, with native plugins, support for native code might even be said to be slightly better; but certainly no worse.
Did you ever see the WebOS? If you want aesthetically-pleasing, you don't want Android, you want WebOS. I know you were talking about the tablet itself, but if you have a beautiful tablet, you want it running the most aesthetic mobile OS possible, and right now it is the WebOS, IMHO. The fact that it not a success (yet) in smartphones is more a testament to Palm's horrible marketing skills than to WebOS's faults. Hope HP does better.
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Will be interesting to see what kind of approach HP takes with WebOS. They're in a unique position where they might have the best of both the iPad and Android tablet worlds in that they can provide a much more open experience akin to Android, but still be able to achieve the advantages Apple has from designing both the software and the hardware. Will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.
It isn't a computer replacement, the formfactor already limits the uses and so I like the limited software.
However, the Palm homebrew comunity has X running on webOS so if you want, you can have "real" apps.
I think you naysayers really need to try it, even if it isn't for everyone, it is going to be a great class of device for lots of people.
Probably going to be more successful than one running Windows.
Which OS in particularly do you want them to use?
I believe you can already get Linux and Windows 7-based tablets, and they haven't exactly been flying off the shelves.
Are you saying you are in the market for a tablet, but you are just waiting for one with the right OS? Or are you waiting for Linux or Windows to be updated with a better touch interface? Or apps to be created/updated for these OS's to be better touch enabled?
And are there enough copies of you that will buy this device to make it worthwhile?
On another note, what specific problems do you have with PalmOS?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
If that's what you want, there are a bunch of those available for you already. None of them have been very successful, and the only ones that sell in decent numbers are the convertible ones. Otherwise they're all like netbooks with the keyboard removed.
For now I'd either go with Android, bank on Google and Java and that environment, or wait for MeeGo to grow up a bit and then develop what amounts to a standard Linux system (linux, GNU coreutils, etc...).
Either way you'll need to write some code for touchscreen UIs, but at least both platforms are pretty darn open.
WebOS has some open stuff in the base layer, but their entire GUI layer is pretty much closed, right? So why would anyone choose to develop for it? I mean, if you want a closed-source environment, why wouldn't you just go with Apple's offerings?
coding is life
History and reality beg to differ. If anything, history has shown us that a "full" laptop or desktop OS is NOT what people want on a tablet. The UI for a tablet needs to be different than a desktop. Simply sticking windows or OS X onto a slate and substituting your finger or a stylus for a mouse and displaying an on screen keyboard is not, according to historic sales of tablets, and current sales of the iPad, what people want. I had a Windows tablet and the only thing it better at was browsing the web. For everything else it was worse and I ended up using my Thinkpad and lugging two machines home at the end of the day. I gave the Tablet back to IS after 3 weeks...
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
That. I recently broke down and bought an Axiotron Modbook. This is a standard MacBook that has a Wacom tablet stapled on the top of the machine. Runs real-live OS X (cue snarky comment about 'real' OS. Just note, it does run EMACS).
A very mixed bag. Using a stylus is hampered by the poor decision to run a low end Wacom product with a terrible pen and software that is unable to change the very limited button repertoire based on application. Hardware / Software integration is poor. Support is pretty weak (the company rarely shows up in the forums). Nice idea, but it just "Doesn't work". At best it will be a very niche product - it's fun to work Photoshop in your lap - but actually frustrating because PS really needs a keyboard to be productive.
So, in short, it's just like every other full OS tablet that litters the landscape. Neither fish nor fowl, never really tuned up, never really achieve any market success. This is why the future of tablets is a limited OS with finger touch as the main input.
Now, there isn't anything (at least to my knowledge) that prevents His Jobness to release an iPad pro (aka 'the MaxiPad') that lets you get out on a real USB ports, runs CUPS, runs Terminal, comes with a Pony, etc.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
they said it would run on HP tablets but did not say it would be on the HP Slate they showed earlier this year. But the silence regarding that product means something too. They are probably having problems getting Windows 7 to run well enough on it to be competitive or you know they'd be taking the marketing $$ from Microsoft to be spreading the love for Windows 7.
What is also interesting is how they are staying off of netbooks with WebOS. As you all know, Microsoft now owns and controls the netbook segment and they are doing a good job at killing it off. More specifically, they dictate what screen size a "netbook" has, what the maxium processor size can be and other specifics which pin the device down. And because Microsoft controls OEMs regarding netbooks, HP and others are not going to go up against Microsoft now that MS has stuck their flag into that segment. Only Google and a few independents have the balls to oppose MS there. Remember, the Thai manufacturing association said they fear Microsoft so they are staying away from putting Linux on anything which looks like a PC/notebook.
HP has to dance lightly around what they do with WebOS for fear of upsetting Microsoft so don't expect too much from them. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I hear lots of bla bla tablets sucked before the iPad bla. But I had a Compaq TC1000 (2003 vintage) for a while and I fail to see what I was mising by not having an iPad. Stylus meant I could actually write, click on and move stuff around properly with it; lazy susan keyboard attachment meant I could treat it as a laptop. I had no need to fat-finger gestures when I had the precision of a pen-point - not that I'd have said no to gestures as an addition, but it's hardly a deal-breaker as far as being able to work and browse with a useful tablet device.
FWIW, I'll admit that the stylus was heavy - but this was fixed with the TC1100, which also featured a faster non-Transmeta CPU.
To 'root' my pre on the first day involved only downloading the official development platform from Palm for Linux. I didn't have to go to Windows or OSX or wait for someone in the community to 'jailbreak'. Meanwhile, Android phones from most manufacturers take a few weeks for the community to jailbreak before the fun begins. I'd rather go with a platform where the manufacturer blatantly allows the users the power Palm does. I find it ironic as the base platform is more closed in theory, but in practice is a bit more amenable to hacking.
Though I'm personally not enthused about their HTML5/Javascript 'premiere' approach to applications, I do like the simplicity of SDL/GL/C code to develop other apps.
As a user, I find WebOS' current interface a bit slicker on the multitasking front.
Of course, all this said I don't think I'll ever be interested in a tablet. It's in a useless spot for me of not being as useful as a laptop yet not as convenient as my 'phone'.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It’s become pretty clear at this point that scaling a smartphone OS up, rather than scaling a desktop OS down, is the better approach. Someone had to stick their necks out and try it. Microsoft tried and failed to scale Windows down, but Apple has apparently succeeded going the other way. Let’s not forget that the outcomes were far from obvious even as recently as a few months ago. HP getting on stage with Microsoft in January was their throwing in their lot with the desktop approach. I think they’ll ultimately come out happier having reconsidered. It actually took corporate chutzpah for them to cancel the Windows 7 Slate after showing it.
It is a stopgap, at best. Someone needs to take the time, do the research, and do the work to write an OS for these devices instead of trying to patchwork add and remove bits and pieces of systems clearly designed for other purposes.
You may be right, but remember: shipping is a feature, and, IMO, the most important one.
(disclaimer: happy iPad owner here...)
1) So, basically you're waiting for somebody to come out with 'something' better, but you have no idea what features and/or capabilities it may have [other than it's not the iPad and doesn't use PalmOS].
2) Given (1), you can't really say there are enough copies of you to make it worthwhile, unless you happen to be personally wealthy enough to create this magical device yourself. And fund the development of the OS. And fund the development of the apps you want.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
What is it you'd like to see in a tablet OS? iPhone OS is a pretty full featured version of OS X underneath and Android is a pretty full featured version of Linux underneath. Do you want more GUI elements? A task manager?
The entire argument for running Windows 7 (a "real OS", for whatever that means) on a slate tablet is that you can run all your existing Windows programs, like Photoshop, on it. This guy has a tablet device, and is running Photoshop, and says it doesn't really work, due to lack of keyboard. Take away the stylus, and it'd get even worse, because Photoshop is in no way optimized for finger input. That's why I never get everyone being all excited about running existing Windows apps on a touchscreen slate. Almost none of those apps have any kind of support for touch, and have UIs optimized for keyboard/mouse input. There's an app running where I work on a touchscreen display. Its painfully obvious there was no thought of touchscreens when it was designed. Its so bad that someone hooked a mouse into the computer running it, so there could be some kind of control.
The problem with that touchscreen UI layer that HP adds on is that, as soon as you go away from the few specialty apps they came up with for use with that layer, you see how painful it is to run regular desktop apps with a finger based interface. At least on Android, iPhoneOS, and WebOS, the apps are designed from the beginning to be used with a finger.
We need to work out words for different degrees of Open, from Public Domain to Apple Playpen, with BSD, GPL, and "regular OS" stages (and certainly others).
PalmOS is certainly neither Public Domain nor Open Source, I'm not sure if it goes for Regular OS (you may develop any Apps, but not really hack the OS), or Apple Playpen (You may do only what we like)
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
It is stylistically pretty similar to OSX(mostly FOSS guts, more or less proprietary UI and core applications), though it arguably leans slightly closer to "open" than OSX does. If only for lack of time and manpower, Palm didn't do very much to the stock linux layer(whereas, while it is a certified UNIX and all that, OSX is a bit of a culture shock coming from Linux or one of the classic BSDs) and the WebOS UI layer is largely rendered in HTML+CSS+javascript in a webkit-based system.
It isn't like android, where there is, in fact, an OSS release that you can actually download and build and go(except for proprietary Google components); but architecturally it is basically near-stock Linux(arguably more "stock" than Android's Linux layer) along with Webkit, with a few platform-specific javascript extensions to support program access to specific hardware features.
It isn't exactly the successor to OpenMoko; but it is basically a conglomeration of OSS components, and its "SDK" is extremely close to web development, with a few nonstandard bits and pieces for local application and hardware access stuff.
WebOS is very open: you can develop apps, like in all ecosystems, but also you can hack the OS, an act that is not frowned upon by Palm and is even encouraged ( http://www.precentral.net/palm-hearts-homebrew-community ), although I agree they have not gone so far as to call it Open-Sourced.
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In terms of hardware, HP has(within the limitations imposed by Intel and physics) pretty much been-there-done-that in terms of Wintel Tablets. Their TC1100, with ULV Pentium M, up to 2BG of RAM, 802.11b/g, bluetooth, and fully detachable keyboard was among the high-water marks of the genre. The only difference from what you mention is that the screen was stylus based, both because capacitive displays of that size weren't really available yet, and because XP really requires fairly fine pointing precision, unless you are running at an annoying low resolution, or have managed to get everything working with a nonstandard DPI setting.
They also have their line of "touchsmart" desktops, which run full Windows, have finger-touch screens(in the 20-inch range), and some vendor shovelware designed to give you some touch stuff to do. They aren't bad, per se, you don't pay much of a premium over standard wintel all-in-ones, and the touch can be a fun gimmick, but you don't exactly see them sprouting on every desk. As far as I can tell, the trouble is that, as long as the number of Windows boxes without touch vastly exceeds the number with, "touch support" is going to be an afterthought. MS has done about as well as can be expected in natively rendering touch events into mouse activity, so using applications that don't care is certainly possible; but it isn't terribly pleasant. There aren't many applications that explicitly go beyond that(aside from a few that support some gestures or something, or esoteric warehouse management stuff, and other bespoke specialty things).
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against people wanting Windows-based tablets. Given that building one will basically involve chopping the keyboard off a netbook and springing for a more expensive display, I'm sure that they'll get their wish. However, Windows-based tablets have been tried, off and on, for ages(Windows 3.1 had a Pen-computing add-on) and it has just never worked that well, outside of niche situations with a limited set of bespoke applications(at which point, unless your volume is tiny, you could probably get a ruggedized CE device with 4 times the battery life to do the job).
It pretty much says that these devices are not meant as a general purpose computer and are really something better named a "content consumption device". Neither a general purpose computer (although it has the core of one and you can come close by adding keyboards and all), nor a phone they have a small niche market today. Putting a full OS like Windows, OSX, or even Linux on them is really not a great idea. All three of those are full fledged operating systems designed to do general purpose computing and are really mouse / keyboard centric. That's just not the space that a slate plays in today. They can do less, so they need less - and that "less" gives them more battery life and a more "designed for touch" interface.
I think worrying about webOS not working on a slate PC is exactly the wrong thing to worry about.
The much bigger question is whether moving webOS off of the smartphone will dilute and fragment the operating system too much.
I think webOS is the best designed OS for a phone because it's designed to work with both touch and a fully qwerty keyboard. Looking up contacts, searching for apps, sending a message -- webOS is optimized to do that in the shortest number of "clicks." Better than iPhone OS, better than Android, better than Blackberry. I like that. I want webOS to stay that way.
If webOS is moved to a slate PC -- with no keyboard and no phone -- I fear that webOS will lose its advantages as the smartest smartphone OS. And webOS developers would start writing more for slate apps, not smartphone apps. That would suck, especially for those of us who took the plunge and signed up for a 2 year contract with a Palm Pre.
They don't need to worry about Microsoft much since HP already cancelled the WIndows version of the Slate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Palm ditched PalmOS a long time ago. Their new OS is WebOS, which is Linux based, with a UI layer called Luna.
I had worked on a register with a touchscreen, and WinXP. THe register part worked and you could enter data fast because things like scrollbars and buttons were huge. But when you had to switch to something in Control Panel for instance, since the widgets were normal size instead of touchscreen size, it would always be a struggle to move or close a window using any of the GUI buttons.
I agree, forget about using standard desktop OSes. And that's what the iPad is demonstrating.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
So when this ships, iPad will be running iPhone OS v4.1 with multitasking of 300,000 C apps, including about 100,000 games, a game network, encryption with remote wipe, remote find, thousands of accessories, the whole iPod music and movies experience, about 25 bookstores, the fastest and most responsive mobile experience, and between 10 and 20 million installed base. Plus a line of iPhones and iPods that can run many of the same apps, and a line of Macs with the same core OS and free iPhone developer tools.
So many questions:
- how are they going to compete without apps?
- are they going to expose a comprehensive C API so developers can port iPhone apps? (weird how the Android C API is locked down but people call it "open", huh?)
- will they get 10 hours of battery life?
- will they have Flash, will it work, will anybody care?
- will the onscreen keyboard suck? (so far, all WebOS devices had hardware keyboards)
- will there be a single feature that iPad doesn't have? (iPad already has cheap USB and SD card accessories and will likely have a video cam accessory by October)
- will they have no contract unlimited data for $30/month?
- will they have a 16GB Wi-Fi only model for less than $499? (an unsubsidized Pre is $599, the original HP Slate was $549, and Nexus One with 4GB costs $529)
- why wouldn't this just be iPod versus Zune all over again?
- will all the PC enthusiasts who are still at this time ranting about how "useless" iPad is and how much better the original HP Slate was going to be now rally behind this because it's from HP, even though it has many fewer uses (apps) than iPad and no longer runs Windows?
I definitely think HP are going in the right direction dropping Windows for Unix and dropping 3rd party software for 1st party. But they are so far behind. Apple worked on iPad for 7 years before releasing it, and HP will have had less than 7 months. WebOS has been shipping for a year, but when Apple started iPad 7 years ago, OS X had been shipping for 3 years. Along the way, Apple started making their own batteries and CPU's to get to where they could make iPad.
The key thing with iPad is the apps morph it into about 100,000 niche devices. So people buy them for very different reasons. It's like for any particular user, the killer app is completely different, but iPad has it. The killer app on iPad is apps. Not the Web, not email. All that stuff is a free extra. I know people who bought iPad just for WebEx, others who bought it just for the art tools, others purely as a camera accessory, and others who bought it only for Netflix and iTunes.
Even though I have an iPad and am really happy with it, I can't help but sort of root for HP because at least they stopped, turned around, and starting going in the right direction. And it's kind of fun to see Microsoft jilted and Ballmer shown up as a stooge again. But they have a long way to go from generic DOS boxes to competing with iPad.
If people were so serious about buying Windows based slates, the sales of "Tablet PCs" wouldn't have been sucking for the last decade.
Wrong. If tablet pc prices weren't so much higher (on average 3-4 times higher) than a comparably priced laptop, then tablet pc sales wouldn't have sucked for the last decade. I get it, it costs more to add a touch screen - but it does NOT cost $1,000 more (as evidenced by the fact that the iPad with the traditional Apple mark-up starts at $499). The reason sales have sucked is that companies don't want to charge more for newer, superior technology - they want to charge obscenely more for it and the result is that the overwhelming majority of people just decide not to buy the device instead.
I want a tablet running Windows (or even a full Linux distro with the ability for me to at least do hand written notes), but I'm NOT paying $1,000 or more for it. I'll pay in the $500-$600 price range for a tablet in the 10"-14" range, which is what I would pay for a laptop in the 15"-17" range.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
WebOS has such a small installed base, and so few apps, fragmentation is not at all their chief concern. HP needs to outsell all previous WebOS devices by far in the first few months just to keep making HP Slate. They need to get more apps made for Slate than have ever been made so far for WebOS or the project is a failure.
When Pre first shipped, iPhone 3G was $399. Then just a few days after Pre shipped at $299, Apple introduced iPhone 3GS for $199 and iPhone 3G for $99. That was Apple killing Palm for the second time.
So if you are a Palm user, this is another rebirth for Palm, as part of HP. Things not only will change dramatically, they have to change dramatically.
The killer app on phones is calls. On tablets, it's apps. If they don't expose a full C API, they will ultimately be toast. Developers need to be able to port their big screen Windows, Mac, iPhone, and PlayStation apps to HP Slate. All of those are written in C.
Yeah, but without C you can't port iPhone apps to WebOS. You can't port Windows apps, Mac apps, PlayStation apps, Wii apps, and so on. This is a full-size screen. There are many developers with full-size C apps.
Also, on the tiny CPU's in mobile, the devices really benefit from highly-optimized, compiled C code. And if I want to run Web apps, I can do that with HTML5 and client-side storage on iPhone and Android already. We are long past the time when you can pretend that HTML+JS+CSS is a "native" app.
The wall that all mobile systems are going to run right into as they go to 10-inch form factor is the lack of a desktop class API. Once your screen can support desktop class apps your API needs to be able to. The baby Java apps on most phones and fake Web apps on Palm are just not going to cut it on 10-inch screens. iPad has real PC and console apps on it and it runs at incredible speeds.
Anyone looking at my posting history will see I am not a huge MS fan, but in this case I really think the biggest problem is that you can't have a touch based GUI and still be what most people think of as "Windows". A well executed touch based OS takes away almost all of Microsoft's market advantages, i.e. familiarity and application availability. Even if the OS GUI were completely converted to a nice touch interface, almost all existing windows apps would be clumsy to use. This is the closest thing to a level playing field MS has tried to get into in some time. Just look at the phone market, their current premium offering uses the HTC sense GUI bolted on top of WinCE 6.5. It's almost completely unlike "Windows" for the first several steps of any given operation, so why would the average user prefer windows over android/webos?
Insert pithy comment here.
Probably, but if any product is going to be able to compete with the iPad, it will have to be something where the same company controls both the hardware and the software. Consumers don't care about freedom in the FSF sense, they care about what works best for them. So HP is starting out on the right track. I don't think they will succeed, but at least they are starting (well, restarting) with the correctly by doing it themselves (through acquisition, though).
For a WebOS tablet to reasonably take on the iPad, it will have to be top-notch hardware (no, that does not mean an SD card slot, or USB), and it will have to have top-notch software. I just don't see how HP will be able to get close enough to the iPad in either of those. If they market this as an iPad competitor and go after the average consumer, they will fail. If instead, they go after some other niche, they may certainly be able to gain some traction.
I would absolutely love it if HP were to make this into a sort of engineering device, but sadly that HP is dead. They are a consumer company now, and there isn't a consumer company on the planet that can out-design and out-engineer Apple.
Wrong. If tablet pc prices weren't so much higher (on average 3-4 times higher) than a comparably priced laptop, then tablet pc sales wouldn't have sucked for the last decade.
Not at all. WIMP GUIs absolutely suck for tablets, and people hate styluses. I realize there are small niches where a stylus is useful and others where someone might want a touch-screen or pen-based Windows slate, but these markets are extremely limited.
The fact is that there is absolutely no consumer market for a stylus or touch based Windows (or Linux or Mac OS X, with their normal GUIs) tablet. That's why those devices have failed.
That's the reason Apple completely redesigned the interface for OS X for the iPhone, why MS has a completely new interface (finally, and most certainly too late) for Windows Mobile, and why Android is Linux with a completely custom interface.
I want a tablet running {...} even a full Linux distro {...} I'll pay in the $500-$600 price range for a tablet in the 10"-14" range
Then get a Touch Book. Has more or less everything you need (minus perhaps a good support for Flash, due to adobe not releasing support for ARM-based CPUs).
And technically WebOS is Linux at its core, with "dev-mode" (i.e.: installing software from things other than the official application store) available out-of-the-box, and a bunch of various Linux stuff already compiled from Optware. The only limitations are its non standart graphic interface: it's Web-based instead of X-based (but still has SDL support if you want full screen games and the like).
Also doesn't feature a decent note-taking application (unlike the PalmOS), only a post-it application.
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