That's it. HP has announced the discontinuation of all WebOS-based hardware, including all mobile phones and tablets. They plan to explore licensing the software to others however. Yeah, good luck with that. It's a non-starter unless Google pulls Android from OEMs other than Motorola.

And even bigger shocker, HP is also going to discuss possibly splitting off its PC business as well. Seems they're strongly thinking about enterprise-only. And printers.

*snif*
I'll have to go put batteries in my old Handspring PDA for old time's sake.

Unsurprising, but still sad. The writing was on the wall in massive bold letters when the pace of OS updates slowed to a crawl 6-8 months ago, and the Pre2/Pre3 releases kept getting pushed back.

Palm did a lot with very little in terms of developing a very capable OS, and some of their ideas live on in Android and iOS, just as the WebOS team stole ideas from Android and iOS in the beginning. I don't know what HPalm's patent stash looks like, but I think Google should at least kick the tires on a deal to snap up whatever else was in the pipeline when the music stopped.

Ouch. WebOS still interests me, but it just never found any traction. They lacked the skills Apple has to be a monolithic solution with good developer support, and they lacked the ability to compete with the "free" Android alternative if they had chosen to license it.

The big issue is that HP didn't learn anything at all from Palm's own Pre launch failure. How on earth did they believe their tablet would do any business, especially released unfinished. Frankly, they should have just not released any product at all if they weren't committed to mobile handsets. Avoiding the retail failures of mobile would have saved them a bundle. They could have spent the time shopping around a license deal or coming up with a better way to monetize those licenses than just asking for up-front or per-unit cash.

Who would have thought that Apple would become the world's largest computer maker (units shipped and profit), and that the number two company would suddenly think about partially closing up shop. Wow.

This looks very ugly:

From my experience at Compaq going into the HP merger, it sounds about right though. There was this bad culture there where the public usually found out about major moves like this before the employees inside.

This also explains why news was out there about the Pre 3 phone launching in Europe and coming soon to the US.

Overall it really seems like the Palm team was screwed over by the Mark Hurd CEO controversy. He was at the helm when HP acquired Palm, and now Apotheker is there, gutting one of the key Hurd decisions.

Several years ago, I happened to be sitting on a plane next to a chatty HP executive. He was explaining to me that HP's size gave them serious purchasing power for things like hard drives and that this allowed them to do well in the consumer market. Well, now we see that this it's about more than just managing your profit margin.

So far as I can tell, the only other company out there that's had a history of trying to be truly innovative in its PC hardware design is Sony. Back in the day, the Sony 505's were the best subnotebook around, bar none, and the current Vaio Z is still pushing the boundaries (lightweight laptop, clever docking station with its own GPU, etc.). But, I have to say, after my experience ten years ago with the 505, I have no desire to ever deal with Sony customer service ever again.

HP service, even enterprise service (on servers, anyway), is also lousy.

I never thought I'd say it, but it was a breath of fresh air when I had to call Dell.

What problem did u have? HP was always decent with us (servers too), even though improvable.

TouchPads are now $99 for 16GB and $149 for 32GB models, at least in Canada.

Having worked on the Proliant support team in the past, I could possibly see where Bitt had some bad experiences. Post merger, Carly, or some other high end HP exec really didn't like how much the support division was costing the company. They started outsourcing enterprise non contract support, and later even started doing so on the contract side a bit. This was also around the time when the company was under a pay freeze policy, including for promotions.

The combination of those two things was disastrous. Employees were either being culled in layoffs, or leaving due to the lack of being able to earn more money as they took on tougher positions. They did back off on the outsourcing on contracts when several high profile customers were complaining. But the warranty only support took a big hit.

Compaq took enterprise support very seriously when I started. All people on the frontline phone support had 9 weeks of in depth hands on training time. Then about 2 weeks of shadowing on the call floor. I'm not sure how drastically this changed once the company was HP, as we never hired any new support engineers at the site I worked at.

Basically, every HP support tech I've spoken with in the last three months has been in India. I have political issues with that, but I'm willing to ignore it as a computer professional. However, they are universally horrible at speaking English, and whether due to their lack of English comprehension, lack of training, or just general idiocy, I usually have to explain any sort of problem over and over again. Also, one engineer I spoke with was so unintelligible that I had to force him to communicate via email, and he would regularly decide to stop and call anyway.

I don't have anything against Indian people, but these were employees clearly unfit to provide service to English-speaking customers. I suspect they may be unfit to provide technical support to anyone, regardless of their language, but I can't prove that.

Dell enterprise support largely has well-trained, US-based (and, therefore, generally with good English communication skills) techs. They clearly understand their technology well, and are personable. Again, other than politics, I don't have any requirement to deal with Americans; I've dealt with Australians working for Cisco tech support, and that was pretty good. The issue is the language barrier. The kinds of problems I generally call for are hard to explain on their own, nevermind trying to also work through failure to understand grammatical tenses properly.

Taym, I would suspect that Italian, not being a commonly spoken language other than in Italy (and surrounding regions), your Italian-speaking techs are actually native Italian speakers, and you probably don't have this issue.

I've found that going out on a heavy drinking binge with these people helps my comprehension dramatically.
Not so easy to do over the phone, but not impossible...

I see what u mean Bitt. Interestingly, i noticed that our care pack calls on servers are dealt with by local official HP partner where in fact our contacts have been native Italian speakers. But warranty calls are handled by call centers usually in Eastern EU, and while with HP we've been sufficiently happy, it can get really bad, just as u describe.

... Once i decided to ask for an English speaking person, in the hope things would improve. I could really not get 3 out of 4 words. I Felt bad, honestly, as i could picture this poor guy trying his best in an underpaid job, but i was desperate. The English speaking guy was better, fortunately.

I decided to pick up one of the fire sale 32GB TouchPads from Amazon (I was unlucky in my quest to find a 16GB model.)

Even if rumors of an Android port don't pan out (and I think there's probably more involved there than people are letting on) I figure it'll be useful as a small device to keep in the kitchen for my wife and I to maintain our grocery list, view photos, weather info, etc. It's also nice that they finally released the Kindle app a couple of months ago.

Heck, for the prices they're going for now, I think they're a good buy even if they're just used as nothing other than a digital picture frame.

Can you set them to turn on/off at specific times of day? A digital picture frame needs that ability. Is there a picture frame type app for them that pulls pictures off the network? It's also be nice if said app supported RAW formats.

I'd buy one for $99 to use as a picture frame.

I'm not sure. On my Pre there was a "Mode Switcher" app that could change power status / brightness / etc. based on date, time, and many other things (similar to Tasker on Android) but I don't know if it would work on a TouchPad.

Even if it doesn't, I think the homebrew community is going to get a nice shot in the arm with this fire sale, and someone will come up with something.

Has to be done...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaeOXyA7wo0&feature=youtu.be

Cheers

Cris

Sadly few of them do. Most seem to be $120 pieces of crap. Whether the TouchPad is able to do this or not, it's still a great price for a digital photo frame compared to the rest of the market.

Tony, that's a brilliant idea. I hadn't even thought about using it for that purpose. I might suddenly be in the market for one too...

Yeah, and it's funny, because I'm clearly on the record here as not really understanding the appeal of tablets, but the calculus changes a lot at these price levels. Dropping $400 for something to view slideshows, browse recipes, and maintain grocery lists sounds silly, but at $100, suddenly it sounds pretty compelling.

The next decision will be if I feel the need to shell out for the Touchstone dock for it, which will end up costing almost as much as I paid for the device itself.

+1

Somewhat ironic that I ordered mine via my iPad while on a weekend trip. I'm generally against jailbreaking my iOS devices since Apple also keeps adding features in updates that I want. Repeating the jailbreak dance just isn't worth it to me anymore. With the Touchpad, it will give me a stable hacking platform to tinker with, since I doubt we will see any updates.

On the Android porting front, I bet someone will get the basics working, but never make it feel correct. Much of the work to make it proper is at the driver level, especially with power management. So far, drivers are still the main reason that my Android phone (an older iPhone) just isn't usable beyond going "hey look, I have Android on an iPhone".

Tony, I'll be curious to hear your impressions, especially since you are a former Pre owner. One of the difference I think I remember between the phone and tablet is the loss of the off screen gesture area.

I tried to pull the trigger on one, but the HP site is so hosed that I have no idea if I got it or not. I figure if it comes, ok, and if not, ok. I'm not even sure I have time to dink with it.

The TouchPad section on the UK site just ends in a 404

...and a quick scan of UK retailers shows that they're still asking full price at the moment.

Same thing here in Germany.

I totally agree, and that's been my point from the beginning. I don't think that tablets are inherently useless, but I also think that $400 or more is a ridiculous price for what you get.

Uhhh... yeah. What he said.

My wife has an iPad. She also has an iPhone. She also has an iPod. She also has a Touch. She also has an iMac. She also has a Kindle. It seems to me that, with the exception of the iMac, all of these things have overlapping functionality. What is an iPad other than a super-sized Touch. What does an iPod do that a Touch doesn't do? What does Touch do that an iPhone doesn't do? What does a Kindle do that an iPad doesn't do?

It is preposterous watching her pack for a trip. Her electronics checklist now runs to 22 separate items! On her last trip, she paid nearly $200 in overweight baggage charges. Aaaarrrgggh!

OK, [/rant].

tanstaafl.

I'm not sure what you are dealing with there is an issue with the devices...