Tag Archives | webOS

WebOS’s Moment of Truth

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 11, 2011 at 10:06 am

According to AppleInsider’s Daniel Eran Dilger, the fate of HP’s WebOS may be decided this week:

While webOS is now largely finished and its hardware was ready to sell, HP’s cancellation of the hardware side of the equation, motivated by dismal sales, means that a spinoff of Palm would result in a return to square one for the group, forcing it to formulate a new licensing business in a market where even Microsoft has had a very difficult time assembling a viable ecosystem of mobile licensees.

I hope it lives, even though I’m afraid it’ll break my heart again.

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How Not To Release A Tablet

Posted by Ed Oswald on August 19, 2011 at 1:15 pm

With all the hubbub surrounding HP’s shocking announcement of the death of of WebOS and its various devices such as the TouchPad, there’s been a whole lot of finger pointing. But the most stunning revelations may have come from TheNextWeb’s Matt Brian.

WebOS was tested on an iPad 2, Brian says. The results? It performed beautifully–more than two times as fast as the TouchPad, and running WebOS through Safari on the iPad 2 produced similar results.

If this is true it means HP’s crappy hardware killed the platform, and not the OS itself. That just floors me.

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Aww, Look at That Cute Little Smartphone!

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 18, 2011 at 10:10 am

HP is apparently set to introduce its latest smartphone based on Palm’s WebOS at a May 2 event, several news outlets including PreCentral are reporting. The diminutive (but certainly not small on features) device is only 55mm (2.2″) wide and 84mm (3.3″) tall, and they’ve somehow figured out how to squeeze a slide out QWERTY keyboard in this thing.

The Veer kind of reminds me of the Nokia 8200 series phones from the early part of last decade that were available through the old AT&T Wireless: HP’s Veer is actually very similar in size. Lets just hope HP’s small phone doesn’t nearly burn people’s ears off like the 8200 was known to do.

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WebOS Sans Tiny Plastic Keys?

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 6, 2011 at 10:39 am

You just know that HP will release a WebOS phone without a physical keyboard sooner or later. (In fact, I’m astonished it didn’t happen…well, about two years ago.) Is this it?

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HP's New Plan: No More Worthless Hype

Posted by Jared Newman on January 28, 2011 at 1:02 pm

Broken promises are part of technology’s natural cycle, but Leo Apotheker, HP’s new boss, says that’s not going to happen anymore at his company.

From now on, HP will only announce tech products that are a few weeks away from shipping, Apotheker said in an interview with the BBC. “”HP will stop making announcements for stuff it doesn’t have,” he said. “… That’s a simple management decision, I don’t need to re-engineer the tanker to do that.”

In other words, HP is taking a cue from Apple by announcing only real products instead of lofty ambitions. Apotheker even suggests as much: “I hope one day people will say ‘this is as cool as HP’, not ‘as cool as Apple’,” he said.

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HP WebOS and Windows Tablets Are Real

Posted by Ed Oswald on August 20, 2010 at 1:51 pm

We now finally have confirmation that HP plans to bring to the market both Windows and WebOS-based tablets, the first time the company has publicly confirmed its plans. The confirmation came from personal systems chief Todd Bradley during the company’s quarterly results call.

HP’s on again/off again Windows Slate would be the first to appear in “the near future.” This would be followed by the release of the WebOS tablet — which some are guessing will be dubbed the PalmPad — early in 2011. There is very little detail as to the specifics of these devices, but at least we can officially put to rest the speculation on the company’s plans, no?

The acquisition of Palm led many to believe that the company would be more apt to sell a tablet based on WebOS simply because it would obviously be cheaper to use in-house code. But the company’s silence on its plans, and even some of its public statements, led some in the media to speculate that it had given up on the Windows Slate altogether.

In any case, all this apparent delay is good for one company in particular, and that’s Apple. It’s iPad continues to be the flagship device of this market segment, and the longer competitors wait, the further it will get out ahead. Time is of the essence here.

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The Palm Pre Revealed: The Technologizer Review

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 4, 2009 at 5:00 am

Palm Pre RevealedIs it possible to out-iPhone the iPhone? Again and again, we’ve seen other manufacturers come up with phones that try so very hard to look and work like Apple’s blockbuster, such as this one, this one, and this one. Some beat the iPhone on specs; none has come close to matching its appeal, imagination, or sales. For all the poseurs out there, the iPhone still feels like a product in a category of one, nearly two years after it first shipped.

But maybe the way to truly rival the iPhone is to counterpunch. What if a phone ignored some of the iPhone’s most obvious virtues, choosing to zig where Apple zagged? What if it aimed to rival not the iPhone’s look and feel but its spectacular record of innovation? What if the overarching goal was to be a really good, really inventive next-generation smartphone?

What, in other words, if it were Palm’s new Pre?

Back at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Palm unveiled the Pre with one of the most startling, sexy demos in tech history. Judging from the time I spent with a Pre this week, the phone lives up to most of its considerable promise. The hardware is quite good, but it’s the software–in the form of Palm’s webOS, the long-awaited successor to the groundbreaking-but-obsolete Palm OS–that makes the Pre so special. And the combination of the two is enough to catapult the Pre into a two-phone race with the iPhone 3G. (I suspect that one or more Google Android phones will be in serious competition before long, but the only Android phone to ship in the U.S., T-Mobile’s G1, is behind the iPhone and Pre by a furlong or two.)

Many people will find reasons to avoid the Pre, from its price ($299, or $199 after $100 rebate with two-year contract) to the fact it launches only on the Sprint network (a Verizon version is supposedly about six months away). Still, even if you never buy one, it’s a significant product. The Pre is so solid in so many areas that I expect multiple aspects of its hardware and software niceties to influence and improve competitive products. Maybe even ones from a company in Cupertino named after a piece of fruit.

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