I'm not surprised. I just hope this means they're working out a deal with other manufacturers to license out to. I'd love to see a Samsung WebOS device. Phone or tablet; or both.
The new WebOS phones haven't even come out yet. Something must have really scared HP off.
I read that Best Buy has only sold through 25K of their 270K buy-in of TouchPads and is trying to return them. That's a huge blow, especially after dropping the price.
Interesting that this comes so close after the news of Google acquiring Motorola mobility.
The genius who made the HP TouchPads in Best Buy a non-interactive unit has to be gone by now.
They may spin off their entire PC division as well. HP shares are taking a huge hit, down 6% on the day and another 10% in after hours trading.
A shame, since I keep hearing how good WebOS actually is.
Palm really screwed the pooch by putting the Palm Pre only on Sprint during it's release. I think if they went to all carriers they could have had a more successful launch before all the Android madness.
HP announced the purchase of a UK based software company for an all cash purchase price well above current stock value.
Competitors are having a hard enough time competing with the iPad as it is. Next year will be worse when they release the iPad 3 with a higher resolution screen.
Interesting info that came out: WebOS ran twice as fast on an iPad 2 that they tested than it did on the Touchpad. It even ran faster in the iPad 2's browser as web app than it did natively on the Touchpad.
HP was painfully aware of the TouchPad's hardware shortcomings, insider sources have suggested, with ports of webOS running "over twice as fast" on Apple's iPad 2....The team was even apparently able to run webOS as a web-app in the iPad 2 browser, where it similarly out-performed native code on the TouchPad slate. At the core of the issue was old hardware: the TouchPad that launched just a few months ago was based on the same specification as Palm's original tablet plan, from around two years ago.
HP already had the 9.7-inch TouchPad successor in the pipeline, complete with a high-resolution display to take on what's believed to be a "Retina Display" panel in the iPad 3 and a slimmer, lighter metal chassis... HP had [also] already prepared an overclocked, 1.5GHz TouchPad 4G for AT&T to answer criticisms of the tablet's potency.
Could WebOS have survived on some ultra-fast hardware?
Possibly, but that still doesn't make up for the fact that there are still barely any apps for WebOS in a world where all people care about are apps.
supposedly the A5 CPU in the ipad 2 has features that other ARM CPU's don't have. SIMD I think and a few others.
It baffles me how a company can make a $12 billion acquisition, tout new products in February, and then fold everything 6 months later. If you couldn't make it work why even buy it to begin with? Based on their direction it doesn't even sound like they're going to benefit from the patents. It's not like they're talking about shifting webOS to the enterprise sphere either.
All that said, it's doubtful that the WebOS team optimized their port for instruction sets on the A5 that weren't on the Touchpad's CPU. They basically were just porting it over quick and dirty for testing purposes.
Apple wasn't killing HP in the PC market.
It baffles me how a company can make a [$1.2 billion] acquisition, tout new products in February, and then fold everything 6 months later.
Fixed. You were missing a decimal point there.
HP royally fumbled this acquisition. They simply took too long to get a product to market. By the time the Touchpad launched, the iPad was on its second iteration and there's a dozen or so Android tablets. Even RIM got their Blackberry Playbook out before HP.
So whens the liquidation start? I'll gladly pick up a TouchPad for $100.
Also, that doesn't explain why it ran so fast on an iPad 2, on a CPU that WebOS was definitely not optimized for.
HP says [the remaining Touchpads' fate] will be up to its sales partners... It will give them a case payout for the devices, which they can either return to HP or using the cash, sell the stock at fire sale prices... the rough edges of the TouchPad may become lovable quirks, if it's offered for, say, $150 USD.
I wonder if someone will create an Android port for it, since WebOS is just going to become increasingly outdated on it, and app development for WebOS is going to vanish.
units shipped apple is way behind HP. but if you look at the profits then apple takes home most of the profits in the desktop/laptop market. if not most then enough to leave everyone else with the crumbs.
apple makes a nice profit on every single computer they sell. HP sells most of their computers for little or no profit. most of their high end computer customers went Mac over the last few years.
same with phones. last i read apple takes home 66% of all cell phone profits.
Last edited by al_bundy; 08-19-11 at 11:26 AM.
the reason HP bailed so fast is the rule is you never take on an entrenched competitor unless you can find a niche that they don't address. Apple got it's foothold in the computer business because dell and HP made it their mission to make the experience of buying their most expensive systems as painful as possible and there was the hysteria about vista. even then apple is not trying to go into the low end of the market probably because they do a lot of business with microsoft.
Last edited by al_bundy; 08-19-11 at 11:37 AM.
same here. i'm pretty happy with my pixi that i got for $32 without contract. hard to find a wifi capable mp3 player,and Pandora and and Spotify. it can be used as a web browser or mail too, but it's pretty slow for that.