Fox News’s Clayton Morris has a scoop: drawings and basic specs for HP’s WebOS-based PalmPad, which he says will debut at CES in a couple of weeks. Nothing revelatory, but it’s nice to think it may be on its way sooner rather than later.
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This Dumb Year: The 57 Lamest Tech Moments of 2010
Progress–to swipe an ancient General Electric slogan–is the technology industry’s most important product. Its second-most important product? That’s easy: blunders. In fact, you could argue that the two are inextricably intertwined. An industry that was more uptight about making mistakes might be more cautious and therefore less inventive.
It’s also sometimes difficult to tell where progress ends and blunder begins, or vice versa. If you believe that Google Wave was a bad idea in the first place, you might think it was smart of Google to kill it this year–but if you thought Wave had promise, then it’s Google’s early cancellation that’s the gaffe.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that while the industry’s lame moments are…well, lame, they can also be important. Last year, I summed up a decade’s worth of tech screw-ups and came up with 87 examples. This time around, I’m covering only a single year–but I found 57 items worth commemorating. No, tech companies aren’t getting more error prone; I was just more diligent. And as usual, there was plenty of ground to cover.
Thanks once again to Business 2.0’s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business and, of course, to Esquire’s Dubious Achievement Awards for inspiring this. Here we go…
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HP Slate to Ship, Sport Humiliating Tag
The much-hyped, strangely-delayed, didn’t-sound-like-a-great-idea HP Windows 7 tablet–the one I prematurely (but not unreasonably!) thought was dead–is alive, Engadget’s Joanna Stern reports. But it sports one feature that makes me want to weep: a slide-out tab with its Windows license and other mind-numbingly boring information which no buyer will ever care about. Apparently, HP didn’t want to ugly up the tablet’s underside with this stuff, but felt that it couldn’t just supply it on a piece of paper. I don’t know who to blame–HP? Microsoft? Lawyers? The Feds?–but it’s the final indignity for a product that couldn’t catch a break. Maybe it was cursed…
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Palm’s Pre 2 Looks Nice. But at This Point, WebOS Needs More Than Nice
I don’t claim to have an unerring gut when it comes to judging new technology products. But stuff that knocks my socks off does tend to go on to do reasonably well. One notable exception, however, has been the Palm Pre–I continue to think that it’s one of the best phones on the market (thanks mainly to its WebOS software), but I can’t imagine that anyone involved with it, from Palm/HP to wireless carriers, is pleased with how it’s sold so far.
Today, HP announced the first WebOS phone to emerge since the company bought Palm. It’s the Pre 2, shipping this week in France and at an unspecified future date in the US. It looks like–well, like the Pre only better, with more modern specs (such as a 1-GHz CPU) and a meaty-sounding software update in WebOS 2.0. If it’s all it’s cracked up to be, it sounds like a phone that Palm Pre lovers will love even more.
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Palm Pre 2 Leaked: Like the Original, And That’s OK
D’oh. SFR, a wireless carrier in France, briefly posted a product page for the Palm Pre 2. The page is gone now, but we all know what goes up on the Internet never really comes down. Pre Central has the details preserved.
As the name suggests, the Palm Pre 2 doesn’t deviate much from the original. Instead, it modernizes the hardware — there’s a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM and an unspecified bump in battery life — and refines the design, with a flatter screen and what looks like a matted finish to reduce cracks in the plastic. And of course, WebOS 2.0 will be on board. Think of it as the Droid 2 to Motorola’s original Droid.
It’s tempting to look at the leaked Palm Pre 2 evidence and wonder what HP and Palm are thinking. When HP announced its plan to acquire Palm, it seemed giddy about getting WebOS, but didn’t mention the Pre at all. All signs pointed to some kind of smartphone reboot, not a rehash of the same hardware models that bombed commercially.
But updating the Palm Pre to reach parity with other smartphones doesn’t preclude HP and Palm from being more ambitious at the same time. A slab-like phone codenamed “Mansion” is reportedly in the works, and we know nothing about HP and Palm’s strategies for pricing, marketing and wireless carrier deals.
Certainly, HP is in a deep hole with Palm phones. The App Catalog is tiny and brand awareness is lousy. Maybe the solution lies in releasing a lot of solid smartphones to a lot of carriers, and the Pre 2 is just the beginning. We’ll see.
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Like the Pre, But No Keys?
I’ve assumed ever since the Palm Pre turned out not to be a blockbuster that there would be a more iPhone-like WebOS phone. PreCentral has published some scuttlebutt along those lines.
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WebOS: HP, and HP Only
More news from TechCrunch Disrupt: TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington asked Todd Bradley, executive VP of HP’s Personal Systems Group, whether the company had any intention of licensing WebOS, which it acquired when it bought Palm, to any other company. He gave a definitive “no,” and if that decision has been publicly stated before, I’d missed it.
Bradley knows whereof he speaks: He’s a former CEO of Palm, back when it was an independent company–one that, at one point, staked its future on the idea that a company could be both a hardware maker and a licensor of its operating system to other companies. Some decent products emerged during this era–I certainly dug my Sony Clie–but overall, it seemed to be terribly damaging to Palm, and the fact that the company split into two entires (PalmOne and PalmSource) hurt rather than helped. In fact, it probably contributed to Palm being in the sticky situation that eventually led to it being acquisition bait for HP.
I can’t think, offhand, of an operating system that’s been both a successful in-house platform and a successful licensed one for any period of time. (If you can recall any, shout them out–no, Mac OS doesn’t count.)
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Leaked HP Slate Video Shows the Trouble With Windows 7 Tablets
A YouTube user apparently got hold of HP’s Windows 7 slate, and while leaked videos like these are usually cause for geek salivation, this one was like a car wreck. I just couldn’t look away from the disaster.
If this is the real deal, it quickly illustrates why Windows 7 tablets are bad news: HP’s slate has a control-alt-delete button. Let that roll around for a minute. Because the keyboard is part of the software, and the software is prone to lock-ups, you need a button dedicated to saving the slate from doom. I can only imagine how awful the control-alt-delete button would play out in stores, which might explain why HP is targeting the Windows slate at businesses. Those chumps will settle for anything if it’s secure!
It gets worse. Shortly after firing up the device (a 30-second process), the demonstrator tries to show off Internet Explorer. “Let’s do a little bit of scrolling,” he says, dragging a finger across the browser window. Except, the window doesn’t scroll. An icon pops up, evidently used to open a new tab. Now, the demonstrator’s fumbling around. He opened the new tab by accident. Now he’s trying to close it. The computer lags behind his commands. This is hard to watch.
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New HP Printers: One's Got a Tablet. One Looks Like a VCR. And One's the World's Tiniest Color Laser
Many things have changed about printers over the past fifteen years or so. One that hasn’t is the basic form factors. Both inkjets and lasers may have gotten slicker, sleeker, and more space-efficient, but most of the change has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Today, however, HP is announcing a bunch of new printers and all-in-ones–and three of them are strikingly new, in three strikingly different ways. I was recently briefed by the company and saw the new models in person.
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HP Goes 3D, Sends Movies Wirelessly
HP is anouncing a bunch of consumer laptop news today, including models with emphasis on 3D, audio, and cool performance–plus an adapter that lets users stream high-definition movies from a computer to an HDTV. I got a preview during press briefings which the company held last week.