(There are a few updates noted below from additional findings and research after the original publication of this article) So, in case you haven’t heard yet, HP pulled the plug on all of their WebOS hardware last week. The tiny Veer was a failed attempt to shrink a smartphone, the TouchPad was an iPad […]
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The HP TouchPad: BetaMax for a New Generation (Updated)

Aug 22nd 2011 by

 

(There are a few updates noted below from additional findings and research after the original publication of this article)

So, in case you haven’t heard yet, HP pulled the plug on all of their WebOS hardware last week. The tiny Veer was a failed attempt to shrink a smartphone, the TouchPad was an iPad 1 competitor trotted out to do battle with the iPad 2, and the Pre 3 never even saw the light of day. Maybe all HP really wanted from Palm was patents, because it certainly seems like they were trying to kill off the rest of the company with this lineup.

In the case of the TouchPad, the device released late, after both the Blackberry Playbook and Android’s Honeycomb tablets, and to lukewarm reviews. Everyone was pretty sure that the sales numbers would be bad, but there was hope among enthusiasts that a recent $100 price cut would provide a shot in the arm. Unfortunately, the real truth was worse than anyone would have guessed. Best Buy sold only 25,000 out of over 270,000 TouchPads. Even the heavily followed clearance item experts, Woot.com, could only move 617 at $120 off retail. Talk about getting kicked while you are down.

The TouchPad’s inability to connect with the tech buying audience shouldn’t come as a big surprise. Unfortunately, while many like myself thought that the device had the inside track to becoming the second best tablet on the block, HP was too little, too late, and frankly, either too lazy or too cautious to go all in on their $1.2 Billion investment in Palm. That, and FAR too overpriced.

First off, as late as the TouchPad was to market, it still left before it was ready for prime time. The OS was buggy and lagged often, which lead to a lot of the poor initial reviews. Second, while the TouchPads hardware could have stood next to the original iPad without being completely overshadowed, it can’t hold a candle to the iPad 2. Not. Even. Close. The TouchPad is a bit chunky and, while it doesn’t necessarily feel cheap, the slippery plastic back isn’t exactly endearing, either. Also, while the screen is actually pretty good, the experience is marred by the fact that it is a total fingerprint magnet. Then there is the issue that has plagued WebOS since its inception- the lack of developer support. It is truly sad to see how few apps there are for an OS as solid as this.

HP released an update to WebOS that addressed some of the bugs and lag that plagued the version that shipped with the device, but the damage was already done. In the eyes of tech enthusiasts and the tech press, the TouchPad was already history. If HP had waited an extra month to deliver a more polished experience and had released at a lower price, the TouchPad might have had a prayer. However, considering the PR nightmare generated by the sales figures reported last week, it’s hard to blame HP for sending their uninspiring WebOS hardware line off into the sunset.

With HP pulling the plug on their WebOS hardware, they wrote off $100 million on the unsold devices. As such, HP’s website and some retailers, such as Wal-Mart, began selling off TouchPads for $99 and $149 for the 16GB and 32GB models, respectively. No matter what flaws a device might have, and how big its shortcomings are, it looks a lot more appealing when you knock $400 off the price. Fortunately, I happened to be at my local Walmart on Saturday morning and was able to grab their last one. I’m glad that I did, because there weren’t any left anywhere around Memphis by noon.

So, why would a heavily invested iOS user buy a TouchPad? Well, besides the fire sale price? I’m a confessed gadget hound, for one thing. I currently have seven iOS devices in my house, and have recently owned two different Android phones and a B&N Nook that I hacked about 500 different ways. I love to try new things, and even though I’ve heard good things about WebOS (the OS, not the hardware), I have never owned a device that ran it. Despite the poor initial reviews of the TouchPad, I had heard that the recent update had smoothed things out a bit, so for $150, I just couldn’t walk past without at least taking one for a 15 day trial run.

Since iSource is an Apple site, I’m not going to do a full review of the TouchPad, but here are some general thoughts on the device and OS after three days of use:

  • I have no idea what the hell HP was thinking. Their entire handling of Palm and WebOS has been an example of how not to do anything. They didn’t make a single solid business decision in the last year.
  • HP trying to charge the same price as the iPad was especially stupid. Before the OS update, the TouchPad was FAR too laggy and buggy to be acceptable, even with the $100 price cut. If HP had been smart and tried to go around $300-350 like Acer and others are doing with Android, sales would have been better than they were.
  • After the update, the TouchPad is a really nice out of the box device. After using both, I like WebOS a LOT more than Honeycomb in terms of the polish and elegance of the base OS. This could have been the second place tablet, at least in this generation. The OS isn’t perfect by any stretch, but the card system works very well for tablets (so well that Blackberry ripped it off for the Playbook) and the notification system is very polished.
  • There isn’t quite enough built-in service integration, but what’s there out of the box is really good. The messaging and photos apps have Google Talk, Skype, and Facebook included. There is also a QuickOffice app pre-loaded that syncs with Dropbox and Google Docs, but unfortunately, it is view-only. The QuickOffice site says there is an update coming, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for that one.
  • As far as design and navigation go,the email client is as good as the iPad with iOS 5 beta, and superior to previous versions.
  • The web browser is good, but is a little slower than Safari on the iPad. The Flash integration seems snappier and more stable than on any Android device that I have tried. The browser has not crashed on me, even before the OS update. Hulu skips a bit if you don’t let your chosen content buffer, but I didn’t have any problems playing any of the shows that I tried. The only Flash content I couldn’t get to work in my testing was ESPN3. It would load up and display all of the menus and show schedules, but the shows never played after selection.
  • The battery life isn’t close to the iPad, but it’s acceptable. I made it through a full day of very heavy use and testing, including a lot of Flash viewing, with 35% remaining. Even with the iOS 5 Beta, my iPad 2 still beats that pretty comfortably.
  • Looking through the App Catalog makes me feel sad for WebOS fans. It’s pathetic how few there are, much less high quality ones like we have on iOS. HP needed to buy off devs that way Microsoft is doing to get Windows Phone off the ground. That’s why Windows Phone already has far more apps available than WebOS in much less time on the market.
  • When you consider that the only tablets you can get new for $99 are cheap knock off Android devices with resistive screens, no Android market, and usually no upgrade path or ability to load custom roms. For basic use or as a secondary tablet, the TouchPad is an amazing deal at this price.
  • If this device, as it stands right now with the update, had launched within six months of the original iPad, it would have been a viable competitor. Remember that the original iPad didn’t get the iOS 4 update with multitasking for seven months. I can’t imagine why HP went with this design that was one generation behind.
  • (Updated) HP is now saying that they will continue to update and develop webOS, and that updates will be released for the Veer and TouchPad. I wouldn’t necessarily hold my breath, but it is interesting that they took the time to release this statement on Monday, in the aftermath of the fire sale and all of the stories about it.
  • (Update) This hardware isn’t necessarily at a dead end, even if webOS is. You can already load Ubuntu Linux on the TouchPad and dual-boot it, although it is evidently not as simple as an iOS jailbreak. However, the more intriguing news is that there is a sizable bounty on the table for a working port of Android. Evidently Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich (when available) are going to make their way to the TouchPad. At $99, you can’t beat having more options, especially when those options include access to a decent app selection.
  • (Update) I was aware that there was a cross-promotion between Box.net and HP, and that the Box.net app is a featured app in the webOS App Catalog. It comes with 50 GB of “free” storage, which I instantly suspected was a limited time promotion. However, I was happily incorrect! I already had a Box account, and upon logging in, I instantly was upgraded to a 50 GB account (a $20/month value) for LIFE! In other words, the $99 TouchPad will pay for itself in five months if you need cloud storage!

So, for anyone who doesn’t know what BetaMax was, just roll back the clock 35 years, and replace most of what I said above about HP with Sony, and you will have a pretty good idea of what happened. BetaMax was a video cassette format that Sony introduced in 1975, one year before JVC released the competing VHS format. BetaMax hit the market first, was capable of recording in higher quality, and used a smaller cassette. It also had Sony’s big brand name behind it. Unfortunately, despite the advantages of the platform, Sony made some poor business and marketing decisions, which gave the competing standard the opening it needed. And the rest is history. VHS went on to dominate the consumer electronics world for 20 years, and BetaMax became a niche platform for enthusiasts and a footnote in history.

I have heard the Betamax story used as a cautionary tech tale, similar to Apple vs Microsoft, for years as I have followed the industry. It seems that WebOS is just the latest refresh of this story as history repeats itself. You can build a better mousetrap, but that doesn’t guarantee you anything, especially in today’s world of branding and marketing. Apple and Google are very established brands with respected reputations. Palm had that kind of cache at one time, but they were way past that when they announced WebOS. Despite that, however, they were still able to generate quite a bit of buzz that they would be the first competitor to really go toe-to-toe with Apple’s iPhone.

Unfortunately, what few knew at them time was that Palm was at death’s door, and that the WebOS launch was more of a last chance Hail Mary than a real chance at rebooting an aging brand. Palm delivered poor hardware, partnered exclusively with Sprint when they could have gone with Verizon before the Droid, and had a hard time getting their dev tools and App Catalog off the ground. Palm was already well behind Apple, but they had the opportunity to get out of the gate and get a foothold before Android went big time. We see how well that went.

Even after Palm’s failure, HP swooped in to pick up the pieces, much to everyone in the tech industry’s surprise. I wasn’t sure what to expect when HP bought Palm a little over a year ago. At the time, I hoped that they would pump new life into WebOS, since it seemed like an OS that just needed the right hardware to bring it to life. It had missed out on the number two spot, but there was still potential to be a very solid number three ahead of Blackberry and Windows Phone. As rough a go as WebOS had under Palm, it seemed to be in better position to move forward than either of those platforms a year ago.

Now, however, the outlook for WebOS is pretty bleak. HP didn’t deliver on the hardware end, and is taking its ball and going home, leaving WebOS without a dance partner again. Sure, they are talking about licensing or possibly even selling it off, but who’s buying at this point? It is possible that Google’s move to buy Motorola could scare someone like HTC, Sony Ericsson, or LG, who don’t have platforms of their own, into picking it up cheap as a hedge. There’s also Amazon, who could decide to pick it up for their own tablets rather than forking and skinning Android. They actually have the brand power to really do something with it, too. However, I think it is far more likely that either Apple, Google, RIM, or Samsung will buy it up for patents, and in the case of the later two, to strengthen their existing QNX and Bada OSs.

So, it’s a very real possibility that the TouchPad is the last device that will ever run WebOS. I think that is a real shame. No matter what platform you choose to support, we all need real competition for innovation to continue. Having two major platforms and tons of “me too” devices doesn’t necessarily guarantee that. We had that type of market environment before the iPhone and Android, and where was mobile going then? We need those third and fourth players that can be viable competitors and continue to push the bigger brands on price and features, so that we don’t ever go back to the state of the smartphone in 2006. So, it isn’t good for any tech enthusiast that WebOS, a solid platform that has more polish than Windows Phone and is available on more types of hardware, is light years ahead of the current Blackberry OS, and isn’t vaporware like RIM’s coming QNX OS, is exiting stage left.

So, as a last toast and bon voyage to WebOS, keep an eye on HP’s website. All of the remaining retail stock of TouchPad’s went fast on Friday and Saturday in the wake of HP’s big announcement. However, HP has already stated that they will sell off the remaining inventory through their site, and presumably others like Woot. So, if you know someone that doesn’t want to spend $400 or more on a tablet, but really only wants one for basic out of the box tasks, the $99 16GB TouchPad is a great deal. The same goes for anyone who already has an iPad or Android tablet, but would like a second device for web surfing, flash content, or just to check out something a little different.

As for me, I’ll probably be giving the one I bought to my Dad. He tried it out yesterday, and really liked the browser and email clients, and that’s all he’s really interested in. As a fitting trade, maybe I can dig that old BetaMax deck he got from Sears Outlet 25 years ago out of the attic and take it home with me. One hard luck, obsolete device with included cautionary tale for another sounds fair trade to me.

(Update: After reading stories that broke on Monday while I was writing this article, and doing some additional research, I’m feeling even better about this purchase, and may even hang onto the TouchPad  myself. It’s one thing to buy a dead-end device at a cheap price because it does some things well. It’s quite another to get a dirt cheap capacitive screen device that will run currently supported OSs with 50 GB of included cloud storage, to boot. If you can get a TouchPad when HP makes them available from their web site, I would definitely recommend it. Even if it’s just to get the Box.net storage, this deal is an absolute no-brainer in my book now.)

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