When I go on yee-olde business trip, I generally take my MacBook Air, my Droid X, and my Kindle. I could ostensibly ditch the Kindle and just read books from the phone, but the larger screen and damn-near infinite battery life (with the radio turned off) are a winning combination.

These days, I increasingly see people in meetings with an iPad rather than a "real" laptop. If an iPad did everything I needed, that would let me ditch the Kindle as well as the laptop. Very attractive. Sadly, when I'm traveling I'm often working on technical documents, so I need latex, emacs, etc., never mind a proper keyboard.

Jailbroken iPad with a bluetooth keyboard could potentially solve the software/keyboard issues.

But I won't be giving up my notebook any time soon, regardless of where I need to travel. As long as I don't have to walk the streets carrying it in my hands all day, I'm good with it in a bag on a plane or in a hotel.

The complications here are flash capacity, battery life, weight and sun light screen readability.

There is no doubt that lots of people who own an iPhone and an iPod of some sort, where they'd ideally just have the iPhone. With the iPhone currently stuck at 32GB, it "forces" some people to get an iPod as well.

And some people probably own the iPad and Kindle, rather than just the iPad because of the screen. While the iPad screen is often readable in sun light in the UK, I imagine in many other parts of the world it generally isn't.

Then you have the weight issue. For the sort of person who wants to commute with their eBook reader, it might make perfect sense to commute with the Kindle, but have the iPad at home (because of course it can do a great deal that the Kindle can't).

For me personally, the iPhone/iPad/Laptop cover all bases. My iPhone is always with me and is use for smartphone stuff, some reading, music* and podcasts. The iPad** is the primary non-work browsing device and my laptop is what I sit in front of for many hours a day working.

Certainly there is some overlap between the three, but they all serve distinct purposes for me and it is hard to remember how I survived without them *blush*

I expect most people starting from scratch with no devices would choose to buy less devices than they ended up with, there are plenty of people around who have iPods simply because they owned them before they had iPhones or people with Kindles who bought them before the iPad was around.

* I really need a 64GB iPhone to fit all my music on, but not enough to make feel the need to start carrying an iPod as well
** to be fair the iPhone could do everything I use the iPad for, it is just that the iPad does some of them better due to its size when you don't need pocket-ability

P.S. I didn't actually buy the iPad myself, but if it hadn't been bought for me I expect I'd have bought one with my own money anyway

Dixons are selling them for £89 in the UK if you can find them in stock anywhere !!!

Cheers

Cris.

At £60 it might have made and interesting photo frame. But I reckon by the time the iPad 3 comes out early next year you'll be able to pick up an iPad 1 with a knackered battery for <£100, which would be a far more sensible idea, for me at least.

An interesting point I just made to my brother on the phone earlier... I'm not sure if anyone other than Samsung is even selling more non-iPad tablets than HP was prior to this firesale. I doubt Motorola or RIM are selling more than a few thousand each month.

From a financial perspective this move likely makes a lot of sense for HP. It's just a shame they royally fucked the whole thing up from the beginning though. None of the WebOS products had any chance at all. The good news (for HP) is that they may very well pull off this transition the same way IBM did a few years ago. Motorola was saved by Google and it's doubtful RIM will make it until the end of this decade. I give them no more than 5 years unless they dramatically change direction/focus.

I wonder if anyone at Microsoft is laughing about HP's WebOS blunder. In between sobs of the potential loss of Windows licensing opportunity should they exist the PC business...

That does seem a bit extreme, even to me. The redundancy between the iPod, iPhone and iPod Touch seems a bit strange. I could see the iPod and the iPhone since the iPod offers much more storage for pure music.

For me, my breakdown between iPhone and iPad seems to be for these uses:

iPhone: calls, text messaging, camera, video chat, alarm, instant messaging, podcasts, music, GPS, social checkins, reminders, flight status and boarding pass, some games to pass the time, twitter, maps reference, mail, some web browsing, and calendar reminders/game reminders (cursed Eve)

iPad: Netflix, local LAN video streaming, news video streams, books, comics, mail, web browsing, magazines, star maps, photo browsing, maps for reference, pdf and other documents, longer session games, SSH, VPN access to work, twitter, flipboard for RSS browsing, notes in meetings, remote desktop, video podcasts, a way to show someone at work a site or e-mail to discuss, and battery life. Because it can just sit in standby and receive push messages for so long, it's much easier to use for work e-mail when away then it is to wait on a laptop to boot and sync down messages.

Yes, much of what I do could be done on the iPhone, but it's just not the same. The iPad virtual keyboard is much more usable, and with the higher resolution, SSH sessions and remote desktop sessions are also easier to deal with. Comics and books work better too, since there isn't as much scrolling and squinting. In many ways the iPad has replaced what I'd use a small laptop for. The laptop still is useful for a real keyboard, but I could tote around a bluetooth one (no jailbreaking required) to type longer things on the iPad. A larger laptop still appeals to me for mobile gaming (WoW, Starcraft and such), but only when I live near friends I want to game with in person. For now, the desktop computer fills the roll for big games.

Oh, the dedicated book reader part I could see too. While the iPad is nice for night reading due to the backlight, it's not great for on the beach. The weight is also an issue. I may be looking into a small reader (not a Kindle) again soon.

Well, two out of 22 is OK, I guess. I think she got the iPad because her techie friends had them and she didn't want to be left out.

tanstaafl.

I got my TouchPad tonight, updated it to WebOS 3.0.2, and installed the Preware/homebrew stuff.

It looks to me like HP did the right thing by pulling the plug. They gave it the old college try, but WebOS 3.0 on the Touchpad hardware feels about a half-generation behind what you can get from current Android or iOS devices. WebOS really is the Amiga of mobile OSes -- a lot of superior ideas, but just not enough momentum to sustain itself.

It's certainly a capable device for browsing the web and whatnot, and it'll be fine as digital photo frame -- but I do hope the Android port comes to fruition to unlock the potential to do much more with the hardware.

I couldn't. Dixons in Heathrow T5 (I was on my way to Frankfurt) had sold out within 90 minutes of opening; so I sent the wife to a PC World near her office, and they'd just sold their last one as well.

it took 3 days before i finally got a confirmation email telling me HP actually processed my order!

HP is producing another batch, to sell at a loss...

http://h20435.www2.hp.com/t5/The-Next-Bench-Blog/More-TouchPads-on-the-Way/ba-p/68749

This has to be a play to try and get some sort of established tablet user base to make a buyout of the WebOS division more appealing. Or the new CEO really is just interested in burning money for the hell of it.

This is likely to use up parts they've already ordered. It's still going to cost them more money than just abandoning those parts however.

But if they can use this to kick-start a development eco-system, they might have a better shot at licensing WebOS...

that's about the only reason i can think of. of course, with people looking at building android for it, who knows if that will play out.

But that's not going to happen.

Who in their right mind is going to commit real dollars to developing for a dead platform that might have only a few percent chance of one day being reborn? And with a tiny customer base, even after firesale prices?

Development for Android based tablets isn't exactly fairing well and that has multiple companies pouring millions of dollars into keeping it going, let alone Google continuing development and improvement.

Anyone at HP who thinks this is a good idea is completely out to lunch. The only reason to announce such a move is to further damage their stock. Perhaps top executives are all secretly shorting? They're doing a fantastic job of running the company into the ground and it's only getting deeper each day.

The only reason I can still see for licensing WebOS is for vertical market applications. And even then it's a really tough sell, because you'd probably be much better off with the "free" solution in Android for that. HP has done such a fantastic job at tainting this product that I don't know if it has any future at all in anyone else's hands.

That might be what they're planning, but who on earth would develop for the platform when it has such an uncertain future? About the only thing we seem to know for sure is that WebOS, since HP bought Palm, has seemed destined for printers. Are developers really going to write for that? Seems Windows Phone 7 is a better bet these days...

I think the recent trend that most amazes me is the praise/approval some journalists are showing for this move as a tablet business strategy - moving forward!

Some of them even think this firesale is going to upset iPad sales. Um, yeah, and I have a shiny bridge you might be interested in buying. I have no doubt that HP will clear all its stock at the $99 price point, but the quantities we're talking about here are still negligible when compared to the iPad's quarterly cycle - let alone its entire lifecycle.

I've also seen speculated that Amazon is going to enter the heavy loss-leader game with a tablet, trying to emulate early-life console business. Good luck with that. Nintendo got out of that game quickly which kept them alive for the last generation. Both Sony and MS sold at a loss only while working on cost reductions, and while taking a large chunk of titles published through them. For Amazon to even think of doing this they'd likely have to restrict the device to only their store. Even then it's a different ball game.

Cyanogenmod on the Touchpad alpha release: WIN.

The developers say it's buggy, but I'm happy to report that even at this alpha stage, it's very usable. I didn't have much time to play with it this morning before work, but I did get as far as booting up, opening up a few web pages, and installing SlingPlayer (which seems to work fine.) Swiftkey complained about not being optimized for tablets, but seemed to work anyway -- I'm guessing it's just lacking the split thumb-typing mode.

Overall speed is faster than Webos, which was to be expected. They did say battery life is really poor right now, but I rarely use mine on battery for more than a few minutes anyway.

Here's a two-sided argument.

- Android and iOS are the two dominant platforms. Win Phone 7 is a distant third. WebOS isn't on the map. Give it up, it's over.

- The WebOS "platform", such as it was, was pretty much a variant on the HTML5 "platform" we're seeing increasingly these days. A WebOS application and a Chrome application have more than a passing resemblance, if you squint your eyes right.

As such, while I doubt that WebOS will come back in any meaningful way, I would expect many ideas from it to get folded into the behemoth that is HTML5, which may well become a serious player for cross-platform mobile apps (i.e., you write a trivial wrapper around the HTML widget and otherwise ship a very portable app across platforms).

Hey, at least it didn't disappear into the dustbin of history like the software for another device I won't name.

In the phone space, perhaps. WebOS does have a leg up over Android here, it is an OS built from the ground up for touch by finger. Just as iOS, and WP7 are. Android is improving in this regard (3.0 started taking it more seriously and 4.0 is improving), but it has a ways to go to outgrow it's older smartphone roots.

WebOS would have a hard time gaining momentum here due to the dominance of the other strong newer generation mobile platforms. Should be interesting to see if any of the HTC/Samsung types of the world start using WebOS as a possible club against Google if they feel they are losing the control they want over Android.

The touch tablet side is definitely not over. iOS is 90%+ of this market. WebOS is almost as strong as Android in this space fighting over the current scraps. This is in part due to the firesale HP ran. Microsoft isn't even here yet, though they look to be arriving with a pretty serious platform with Windows 8. (I've had some hands on experiences recently). Google and friends show no signs of slowing their attempts, and HP has also commented they may do future tablet hardware. Should be an interesting couple of years in the space.

Huh? Are you talking about having controls other than the touchscreen? Because, unless I'm mistaken, every single webOS device except the most recent one, the HP TouchPad, had a hardware keyboard.

That's actually also the first thing I thought.

Peter

No, I'm talking about the era in which each platform was born, and what input mechanisms were a priority in regards to the design of the OS. The initial Android project started back when the common smartphone/PDA interface was either stylus driven, or some sort of trackball/cursor based navigation.

Android was following those examples for the early designs. The OS was then adopted to a more finger touch friendly setup. Google made it work well enough to keep many folks happy with their phones. And Microsoft seems to be on a similar path in the tablet space, taking their much older Windows core built around keyboard and mice (and later styluses via the Tablet PC projects), and adopting it to finger touch for the more modern tablet. It can work, but it's the difference between reworking part of the OS for a new interface, vs being designed day one for the interface.

Another parallel would be early Windows (non NT) vs Mac OS (non OS X). Windows was just a GUI shell program bolted on top of the DOS OS. Mac OS was from the ground up a GUI OS. During boot with Windows, you got to watch DOS boot first in a text mode console. And if Windows failed to start, it dumped errors into the text console. Mac OS booted always in a GUI, and always presented GUI errors if something went wrong during boot. (This is meant as a high level example view, vs a low level discussion about boot firmware, OS kernels, GUI windowing systems, etc)

This article from a former Google intern helps talk about this in much more detail:

https://plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/VDkV9XaJRGS

That post gets so much wrong... the corrections at the top help but are not enough.

I know what you mean, but you've picked up a very poor example. The startup phase of the Windows and classic Mac OS really weren't that different in practice.

Yes the Mac didn't show you a text console, but when it came to errors it no more GUI than Windows/DOS. An unhappy Mac or a cryptic error number really doesn't count as GUI

Do you have time to point me to somewhere that can properly answer why Android always feels lagger then iOS and WP7 UI wise? I thought the corrections by the Square CTO and the response from Dianne Hackborn was decent, but I wonder why you say it's "not enough".

This isn't meant as an attack on Android. It's mostly to try and answer the "why" question in my mind, as I do know some people who have chosen iOS over Android purely based on the input differences. My suspicion has leaned towards the difference between a tightly coupled system vs a more "open" one meant to run on all kinds of various hardware, thus sometimes suffering from the lowest common denominator issue. The response from the Square CTO hinted a bit in this direction (the LCD need for both hardware and software rendering until everyone is at 3.0 or above), along with the quality of developer tools being another factor.


Very true. The main point though is that it helps to know what the priorities are between different projects. Knowing this can help make much more informed decisions on what path to pick.