The Veer... Seriously? Were they getting complaints that the Pre was too big? Could be a good starter smart phone for kids. With great vision.

Pre3. Hmm.. Nice resolution on the screen and some cameras. Doesn't come out until after iPhone5. 8 and 16GB. Not impressed. Seems like a dud to me. At the same time they're announcing this thing, they're also announcing that the older Pre2 is just starting to ship on VZ. Embarrassing.

TouchPad. Really? "TouchPad?" I suppose they couldn't think of anything more generic. Or that isn't already trademarked by Synaptics. You know, the touchpad people. It's heavier than an iPad. It's thicker than an iPad. It looks EXACTLY like a 3GS iPhone in large format. The OS is even more iOS-like than the phone version of WebOS. Take a look at the Mail app, including layout, window chrome and buttons. Or the on-screen keyboard. There are some nice software features on the platform, but if this thing isn't just an iPad clone, I don't know what is. The physical keyboard looks suspiciously familiar too. 16 or 32GB. Wow, how anemic.

No word on price yet.

I'll wait on my thoughts until the announcement event is over. As far as weight, they said 1.6 pounds. The iPad with WiFi is 1.5, the 3G is 1.6 pounds.

I was comparing it to the WiFi model because that's all they'd announced it would come with.

Seems like they do have a model with 3G and GPS. Or rather "will have" - no date has been announced for it. It should also weigh more since the 1.6lbs was specific to the WiFi-only model.


No pricing given for any of the products. This leads me to...

Phones... No carrier partnerships established yet for the new models.

Tablet... They want to wait and see what Apple does with the new iPad and potential re-pricing of the older model.

The proximity and multi-device touching capabilities sound great, as well as the continued use of "wireless" (really "jackless") charging. I'd like to see this from Apple. In fact, I'd like for Apple to acquire someone and really grow this technology.

The biggest problem with these products, by far, is that they're not already shipping. I think the Pre3 will be completely wiped from memory by the time summer comes around.

As a Pre early adopter, I'm coming up on my two year contract expiration date in June, so I'll be giving the Pre 3 some serious consideration. Unfortunately, it really does look like they're just playing catch-up with Android/Apple specs as they are now, not what they'll be in six months, and despite how much I prefer the slider with portrait physical keyboard form factor, I'm going to have to consider other options if I'm going to commit to another 2 year contract.

I still don't think can stomach a phone without a physical keyboard, so the iPhone is probably still out, but the selection of Android phones with physical keyboards is much better than it used to be. I still don't think there's a portrait slider with physical keyboard (correct me if I'm wrong) but I could *probably* adjust to landscape keyboard if I had to.

My homework assignment over the next few months will be to spend some significant time looking at some Android models to see if any of them appeal to me. If not, the Pre 3 might be the winner by default.

The Pre3 still looks better than any Android phone I've ever seen or heard of. By a long shot. They should have just kept working on it and not announced anything until 3 weeks before delivery. With a 32GB model and without an 8GB model.

In addition to the other things I said Apple should implement, I really wish they'd also implement the card metaphor they came up with, which Palm borrowed for WebOS, and take it OS-wide to show specifically which apps are running. The current multitasking bar includes both running apps and recent apps, which may not be running, with no way to differentiate them.

True. 1.5 -> 1.6 though to me isn't heavier enough for me to even care about. Considering the TouchPad has wireless charging, and stereo speakers, I'd be fine with an extra .1lb to carry. The one downside appears to be battery capacity. Apple says the iPad is a 25 watt hour battery, and the TouchPad is coming in at 6300 mHa. Not sure of the exact voltage to convert the iPad number, but it seems the TouchPad might be a little lower capacity. With a dual core CPU, and other hardware to drive, the Thinkpad may be down an hour or two compared to the iPad, if not more.

The TouchPad has me interested in a number of things, and would appeal to me more then a Honeycomb tablet. The big thing I like is the integration between the phone and the pad. I still find it odd the iPhone can't show me my SMS messages on my OS X computer, when an older Sony Ericsson T68i did this ages ago. Pal^H^H^H HP is now doing this between the phone and pad, and has even more integration with the ability to pass off URLs and other information. This is an area I hope to see both Google and Apple improve. If I'm buying into a whole ecosystem, I want easier ways to move between devices.

I do share in the appreciation of the card metaphor too. I'm not overly bothered by the situation on the iOS side showing opened and closed apps in the bar, but I think the card layout is cleaner when bouncing between a few apps.

The smaller Veer phone I think will find a market. It doesn't really appeal to me these days, but in the pre smartphone days, I generally preferred phones like the Nokia 8210 and SE T68i. I could see a number of people wanting to stay with a tiny phone even when jumping into the smartphone space.



I agree. Announcing the Pre 3 this early really shows the previous phones aren't selling well at all today. Announcing the tablet this early is probably good though, to at least get it in the minds of people while Honeycomb and the iPad 2 roll out. Gadget blogs are likely to do comparisons against the TouchPad now, whereas had HP waited to announce it in the summer, it would be past the shipping point for the competitors.

The WebOS platform to me is still more interesting then Android. It has a good level of polish, on par with where Apple, and Microsoft with WP7 are, and I'm glad to see HP putting a lot of resources behind it. Honeycomb shows a lot of polish improvements, but only time will tell how the 3rd parties are going to wreck it with crappy skins and app launchers piled on top of the stock Google experience.

Oh, I am glad to see HP went with the 4:3 form factor for the TouchPad. The switch between portrait and landscape with this type of screen is much less jarring, then when the same transition is done on a 16:10 or 16:9 screen. Portrait mode on widescreens just makes me think I have too little horizontal room.

The resizable keyboard is interesting, but not sure what practical use it will have.

One big downer in today's news is the fact that there won't be any OTA updates of original Pre units to WebOS 2.x. That means I can't take it for a test drive on my Pre to see if it's worth staying on the WebOS platform until the Pre 3 comes out. That's very disappointing.

Apparently they haven't ruled out some other means of getting 2.x onto the Pre via a desktop update, but given their history of promises broken ("Flash on the Pre in Fall of 2009", "Pre 2 will be a significant upgrade", "Pre owners will get 2.x as an OTA update") I find it hard to believe they'll be eager to allow power users to install the OS update when they can instead use it to entice people to buy the Pre 2 now (or the Pre 3 when it comes out.) The best hope is that someone in the WebOSinternals homebrew community makes it happen, but that's no sure thing, either.

It's just really disappointing to see them backing off another commitment, especially now that they're under the HP ownership. I'm not saying it's a definite sign of things to come, but my hope was that HP taking over would lead to a more consistent, customer-friendly strategy where they meet deadlines and deliver on promises. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Wow, I missed the biggest bomb of all. HP is bringing WebOS to their desktops. I wonder if this will be, at first, in a dual-boot configuration or if they'll jump in with both feet and offer some desktops (and notebooks one would assume) running only WebOS.

Sounds like smart move if they want to define themselves as a premium products company. But it's going to be a struggle I'm sure.

Best Buy has pricing for Xoom tablet pre-orders on their site. $1200 for the 32GB model.

On the one hand it seems ridiculous and screams of mistake. On the other, it's up publicly and hasn't received a correction. It will probably turn out to be the previously reported $800.

For HP's sake, they'd better have competitive pricing on their goods.

Yeah, most outlets missed that because it came at the end of their ridiculously long (over two hours) press conference.


From what I've heard, it's actually running on top of Windows 7, so the computers are still running Windows. I thought that was odd at first, but it seems like a natural thing to do to their touchscreen PCs.

(I'm going to respond to your Xoom thing in the other thread we were discussing it in, Bruno...)

I couldn't remember what thread that was in. I'll copy my comment there once you've posted so I can see where it goes.