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WebOS Chief: Don't Fret Over TouchPad Reviews
Fudge Factor 3000 writes "HP released their much trumpeted enterprise tablet, TouchPad, last week. This device was also the first to showcase WebOS in a tablet. The tablet received several harsh reviews, though some stated that the OS showed potential. Most of the criticism surrounded the sluggish software and the lack of apps. As reported by CNET, WebOS chief Jon Rubenstein rallies his troops by comparing the WebOS tablet's debut to that of Mac OS X, which also struggled early on. However, it is not entirely clear if the comparison is appropriate, since WebOS has existed since 2009, and OS X had the ability to run most classic OS 9 apps during the transition period. Nevertheless, one can certainly argue that the situation is similar in spirit."
Another reader tips a related article which suggests that — for better or worse — Apple has succeeded in defining what a tablet should be, making it difficult for competitors to get a foothold in the market.
While it's pathetic and sad that so few vendors can come up with something whose usability matches the iPad, it is interesting to see Apple take such a huge slice of that pie.
Last I recall they had something like 90% of the market, which is easily monopoly territory. It'll be fascinating to see if they succumb to the temptation to abuse it, or if they can stay their hand.
If the answer is "nothing" or "something they could have just implemented on Android" then why didn't they just make an Android tablet?
I don't think WebOS is going to end up succeeding, but I am going to give HP some credit for at least trying to do more than just ship whatever Microsoft hands them.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Currently they have the only product managing an interresting enough balance between quality and price.
But in the long run ? Once the hype dies ?
They'll probably remain as a luxury type of product as usual. The masses will probably slowly start to get more attracted to cheaper solution produced by noname asian companies and running free Android.
(The cheapest iPad 2 starts at more than 450€. There are *full blown* netbooks and laptops costing less than that. The post office at the corner of my street is having a sale on an Android tablet for less than 100€)
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Back to TFA's subject :
the lack of apps
Come on ! What do you expect ?! The TouchPad has just been released now. Of course there aren't much applications available yet. Specially if you compare with the iPads which have been around for quite some time, and to the android devices (where unofficial tablets have been around for quite some time before the official launch of Tablet-oriented android versions, giving some head start to application developers)
The speed might be slightly more problematic: Lots of stuff which was done in Java in the webOS 1.x serie has been now replaced with Javascript in the webOS 2.x-3.x Until the Javascript engine is brought to some serious level of optimisation (I don't even now if it is JIT-ed or not), this is bound to be slower than the highly optimized and JITed engine of Java. I hope future versions of the OS will address these shortcomings.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
When Mac OS X was released, Mac OS 9 still worked. It took until 10.3 or 10.4 before Mac OS X was used extensively, if I remember correctly.
It takes around 4 years for an OS to develop, and another 2 to fully bake. The iPad got an early start, since it's mostly the same as the iPhone. WebOS lost a year due to the acquisition.
They need to keep iterating. The embedded market is huge, and can afford to wait. Apple will never embed iOS, and Android has licensing issues vis-a-vis Microsoft. That leaves the embedded market to...HP?
I'm not really surprised. Yes, WebOS and the remnants of Palm are still alive and kicking but Palm didn't do themselves any favors. There was a time that Palm made the best products out there and had the operating system that everyone loved. The along came RIM and the Blackberry and at first, the old Blackberry devices did well but they sucked to use. Anybody remember the 857 and 957 from a long time ago? Then along comes Apple, then comes Android.. It's cyclic in nature and Palm didn't keep up with the industry. The first release of WebOS was interesting but again it was trapped in the Palm Pre. Mine locked up so many times that after one month I returned it.
Do I give WebOS some credit? Well, yes, there are some nice UI elements but again, what's it compatible with and what developers will build apps for it?
RIM is now seen as a fading player so what does that leave for everybody else? Will the tablet and phone world start to look like the Windows World in the 90s where MSFT just built an O/S and there were multiple players who built the hardware? Who knows, but I will tell you that Apple doesn't like to share and marginalize their profits. The challenge will be making the next device because the cell phone market is already slipping from them.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
HP has the same problem as Nokia and RIM. Company execs aren't putting enough resources into their new OS's to get things moving.
Nokia had a good thing started with Maemo/Meego. Just look at the recent N950, N9 reviews by Engadget and others (
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/21/nokia-n9-first-hands-on/ ; http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/30/nokias-n950-demos-meego-harmattan-in-marathon-video/ ). A great start/ideas, but they didn't put enough of their not insubstantial resources behind it to get it developed quickly. They gave developers a mixed message, which had a lot of them sitting back waiting to see if there was going to be full commitment by the company before joining in.
Result, the new OS floundered from lack of backing, and they ended up turning to Microsoft.
RIM had been giving the developers the same mixed message about where they are headed. QNX could be an awesome phone OS. Frankly, I'm not sure why someone wasn't putting it on phones years ago. Will it succeed? If it does, it will be despite the big brass's ambivalent attitude.
And now we have HP, which bought a great little OS in WebOS from Palm, that just didn't have the money to dig themselves out of the hole they let themselves get into.
HP's administration said they were going to "double down on WebOS." Their new CEO says they are going to "be cooler than apple". He's also said they were going to avoid the same mistakes made in the past and that they would now "ship products within weeks of announcement"".
HP keeps claiming they have 'incredible scale' and vast resources to make WebOS a success. But since the purchase of Palm, they haven't put their money where their mouth is.
What have they done with those vast resources?
They let the bulk of the creative talent from Palm, the folks who had all the great ideas that make WebOS the induitive OS that it is, leave to go to Apple, Google, or anywhere but HP.
They've put out the Veer, which is basically a smaller version of the original pre, with slightly upgraded hardware.
They have essentially converted a tablet that they were originally going to have run a MS OS. Their Touchpad is bulkier, heavier, and has slower hardware than the competition. And the OS is laggy.
The 'Cool thing' about the Touchpad was that it is supposed to synch with their(new) phones, (Veer, and Pre3). The veer is selling terribly because it's too tiny for a smartphone.
And the Pre3? The Pre3 was announced in February. It's going to ship (in the U.S.) in the Fall. With specs that are way outclassed by phones already released with Android, and facing a likely new iPhone in the fall, as well as some insanely better hardware in the Galaxy S2.
Not much to show for HPs vaunted vast resources.
And then there's customer service...
Original Pre owners were strung along for many months by HP, who told them their Pre phones would be upgraded to WebOS version 2.x and finally get FLASH, that was promised to them 2 years ago when the phone first went on sale. Then at the last minute, folks found out (via twitter, not even a real press release) that that wasn't going to happen.
Then they said they'd do something to 'make things right' to the WebOS users. What did they do finally? Their marketing guys attempted to upsell those folks by giving them a $50 coupon for the touchpad. But only if they got the high end 32MB version. And only if they did it within 30 days of the notice.
Not timely, not cool HP.
I'm afraid WebOS is fated to go the way of BeOS. O
I'm a big fan, too, and was pretty saddened by the poor reviews of the TouchPad to see I'd been let down.
It's a little hard for me to understand what HP was thinking. From where I'm standing it doesn't look to me like they did a good job in a that fight over before it started. It looked to me like they under invested and screwed the platform.
You get to pick up to 2 of: fast, good, or cheap. They managed to be none of fast, good, or cheap.
Fast: They were late to market, with HP doing seemingly nothing for about a year. They're enormous, why didn't they hire more (or more likely, better) people if they couldn't iterate as fast as the competition.
Good: They had more time than the competition, and are an enormous company, yet managed to still ship a half-baked product with major bugs like random slowdowns promised to be fixed in a future update.
Cheap: Worst of all, they have decided to price the TouchPad as a premium tablet, about the same as the iPad2, or Samsung Galaxy Tab. They couldn't stand taking a few video-game-console-style quarters of losses to build market share for their nascent ecosystem?
If this was their plan, I don't know why they bothered to buy Palm at all. Palm under HP didn't seem any better funded or to execute any better than when Palm didn't have the backing of the world's #1 computer maker.
I've never, ever, had a friend say "I would like a cool new game to play. And it has to be one that I can only download from one site...
That's odd because I've heard a lot of people say that very thing about Live or PSN, that they like having a place to go find stuff.
They don't define it as a single source, approved by a hardware vendor. But they end up using it more EXACTLY because of those conditions which lead to products they want being in that store.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
LOL wut? My asus 1215n has a dual core Intel D525, a gorgeous 12 inch display at 1366x768 and gets a solid six+ hours on the battery. It is the best portable computer I've ever owned, and I've owned many in 15 years. I do wish it had faster mechanical storage, but that can upgraded. Running debian stable, I pretty much never feel like I'm waiting on my hardware.
Perhaps you need to update your knowledge of the current state of netbooks?
I think everyone is under estimating HP an letting Apple fanboys dictate the PR.
Here's the first think that will differentiate the TouchPad from the iPad: PRICE
Although the SRP is the same as the iPad, Apple doesn't discount. HP does. Expect to see the TouchPad for $50 less than SRP to be common place. And as production scales up expect deeper discounts. HP doesn't sell more computer than anyone else for no reason. While the hardware specs might not be quite a good as iPad2, at a better price point they will prove good enough --especially at the next issue comes into play...
Most of the speed issues are software issues and will be ironed out over the next couple point releases of webOS. As will the number of Apps available. By Christmas the outlook will be much better.
Also, expect HP to release more many models. Already there are rumors of a 64GB model and a 7" model. HP's ability to produce models is actually a little scary --have you ever looked closely at all the models of printers and PCs they role out? It's like three new models every quarter. I don't expect them to go that far with their tablets, but I would not be surprised to see a half-dozen more tablets and/or phones sometime during the next year or so.
And then there's webOS on the desktop. That's the next shoe to drop. Expect HP to replace the "splashtop" they now offer with a light version of webOS. Now all those HP computer buyer are getting used to webOS too. That can have a powerful effect in a couple of years!
Bottom line, all HP has to do is hang tough and they will make out. And they have more resources than anyone else to do just that.
Oh, and did I mention webOS on printers?
:T:R:A:N:S:
Step 1: Buy an Android, hack it all you want. Post blogs about your shitty software with direct links to let anybody download your virus invested bloated battery killing software.
Step 2: Acquire inner peace sufficient to allow for a world large enough for people who want a robust appliance and people who want something they can tinker with.
HP are now competing against an entrenched market leader at a similar price point and a huge application library. Unless they can offer lower cost, higher performance, smaller size, better battery life or some other "hook", they're boned.
The app store is an awesome lock-in for apple. All the apps purchased are not transferrable to a non-apple device. Unless they can give me a compelling reason to ditch all of the apps I have purchased on my other i-devices, its going to be a fucking hard sell to get me to buy any tablet other than an ipad.
I don't own one yet (doesn't do anything for my usage patterns), but if i was in the market, it would be a no-brainer.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The problem is, it isn't a computer. It's a giant smartphone minus the phone.
Which happens to be what many normal people actually want from a computer. For the vast majority of people a tablet is actually a better browsing and email machine than a general purpose computer. I have a laptop (which I use for actual work) and a a tablet, which I use for reading, but the lines are starring to blur, and the tablet and even my phone is often used for emails and real work nowadays.
PS This message comes to you courtesy of one of those newfangled and apparently inferior tablet thingamajigs.
Congrats on the superb UI and interesting os. We need real alternatives to Apple and webos is certainly light years ahead of Android and ahead of iOS in some areas. I use iOS but love the way webos has chosen a different direction in both UI and use of HTML, and the idea of cards is great.
As a developer I'd say I'm hesitant about supporting the plaform purely because of the political calculus - will the suits at hp stand behind this os for long enough to build a real ecosystem, and will they resist the strong pressure from their largest partner ms to kill this once it becomes popular? Unfortunately I don't have confidence that they will do the right thing, and strangely without hp backing it I would be a lot more confident about webos.
This is just delusional. The part where he compares the launch to OSX launch was particularly goofy. It pretends that WebOS is a platform that *hasn't* had over two years in the open market to mature. Comparing OSX launch (completely different OS than previously released by Apple) to a tablet launch using an OS that has had a comparatively long time to work out the kinks is just sad. Further complicating things is they showed this thing off nearly 6 months ago in pretty much the same state as it was at launch. With all the intervening time, they didn't seem to complete these evidently 'trivial' fixes.
This also overlooks another major sore spot for the reviews. Even the most favorable expressed disappointment in the dimensions and particularly the weight. Most noted the fact that HP seemed to be chasing the iPad 1 size and weight, though with a considerable bump in hardware performance.
The application space seems unfortunately sparse. They indicated a number of key partners at their announcement in February that didn't seem to actually show up. Netflix being a notable example. They have had an incredible homebrew community that can churn stuff out quickly (probably due in no small part to the ease of Linux SDL code for the desktop being ported to the phone), but it just hasn't been enough. I'm reminded of early on when a very select set of software producers took a leap of faith and released WebOS software on Pre launch, only to abandon it when the market reality set in.
The marketing message is also a bit confused. The Veer keeps saying 'small phone because you want a tablet and why would you want a big phone', but at the same time all their demos and discussions focus around their unreleased 'big phone' Pre 3 as the optimal companion to their tablet.
I may be a bit bitter over the fact that HP seems to have neglected their phone product launch efforts trying to chase this tablet market, and I personally don't want any tablet and might have been interested if they got a Pre3 in my hands in a reasonable time frame instead. Rubbing salt in the wound, the announcement of 'making things right' for early adopters that were told the software upgrades would go further than they did would be $50 off the higher priced tablets seemed to emphasize just how much they are thinking tablets above phones.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.