The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others - Nietzche
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Pre 3 and Touchpad finally bring WebOS the hardware it deserves
AFTER WAITING the best part of a year after buying Palm, HP's announcement of three WebOS devices at once has shown that the firm finally means business.
With the Pre 3 and Veer smartphones and Touchpad tablet, HP has finally given the user a chance to own hardware that is worthy of WebOS. All three devices have understated style and an operating system that rivals Apple's IOS in the user interface stakes, which should make the decision to buy a WebOS device easier.
By launching three devices, HP is making a play for its business customers to purchase a range of devices for their employees. The Pre 3 has been marketed as a business oriented smartphone and, while the specifications suggest it can do more than just view emails, its interoperability with the Touchpad tablet demonstrated yesterday tends to suggest that HP is pitching both the Pre 3 and the Touchpad as all day work devices around the office.
HP certainly addressed the issue of inferior hardware that detracted from previous WebOS devices by furnished the Pre 3 with a 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip and giving the Touchpad a dual core 1.2GHz chip. The company went to great lengths to show what that meant to users by playing back Flash videos and demonstrating the multi-tasking capabilities of WebOS. There was even a jab at Apple, with HP saying that multi-tasking isn't an afterthought with WebOS.
Perhaps the surprise package was HP's Veer. The device's name seems apt, as HP's designers seemed to have veered away from what consumers want and produced a phone that many at the event said was too small to use. There's nothing wrong with small phones, but the majority of touchscreen smartphones have screensizes in excess of 3.5-inches for a good reason, usability.
The Veer has a 2.6-inch screen and a slide out keyboard, but it really is hard to see who the firm is pitching the device to. If it is a business smartphone, such a small screen will make it all but useless for reading anything more than text messages, and if it's a consumer phone, why add the bulk of a slide out keyboard to negate the space saved by such a small touchscreen? Design confusion reigns and where a device has no clear purpose it's likely to fail. The Veer reminds us of Microsoft's ill-fated Kin One, which also had a 2.6-inch touchscreen display and went onto the chart near the top of Microsoft's hit parade of failures.
It's clear that HP's acquisition of Palm not only gave it access to WebOS but the ability to tailor the operating system to work with its own wide range of products. The interoperability between WebOS devices and HP's printers, projectors and even the possibility of WebOS being loaded onto desktops and laptops might entice firms to invest in HP kit throughout their organisations.
HP's WebOS trio and in particular the Pre 3 and the Touchpad do a very good job of showcasing the capabilities of what has always been considered one of the best mobile device operating systems around. All that is left is for HP to deliver these devices at prices that will make it hard for punters to resist the lure of WebOS. µ
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I was an HTC Touch Pro enthusiast with Windows Mobile 6.5.X and upgraded my wife from a "dumb" phone to the Pre because Windows Mobile wasnt all that convenient with a stylus etc and my dislike of the iPhone + Android was very young at that point. But after no updates,wait longer, no updates etc etc, Pre Plus comes out, nothing to help the pre users. Now i was ready for an upgrade and went to the Evo the day it was released and another few months went by still to have nothing better happen for the Pre Users. My wife liked the phone. (LIKED) and now she too is an Evo user and she's loving it. moral of the story is, HP will promise you the world but as soon as they got my money, they turned their backs on us and neglected us and caused themselves a couple phones and tablets.
Stop it you imperialists, the empire is long gone and Palm was sold long time ago. WebOS isn't engineering marvel ("the hardware it deserves"... the smugness of that sentence). If I was a Brit I would be happy with ARM and stop wining about the rest of the British sunken ships.
The Veer is eactly the size that my wife has been looking for interms of a Smartphone, so a hit there for my wife. I have a Palm Pre 2 and it is an excellent SmartPhone so I can assume the Pre3 will be a decent smartphone. The Touchpad is exactly what I am looking for a device that has sensible connectivity, a great Operating System and support from a leading manufacturer.
Looking forward to June and what else HP will be launching in 2011.
When you start having such intrusive adds and pop-up windows galore plus videos that don't all play - its time to remove the INQ from my bookmarks.
Tata!
Clearly, HP is following Apple's mantra of "Give the consumer what WE want them to have, not what they want". That works for Apple. That will not work for HP. The Veer is a joke designed for Teenaged girls. No adult is going to buy and use a phone that is too small when compared to the iPhone or any Android phone for the same $199 or even less. The Pre 3 has no dual core and has yet to be stated to be 4G. It's just a slightly larger take on the same failed design that Got HP nowhere. The Palmpad is a win, but the problem for HP is that they shafted their installed base by promising a WebOS 2.0 upgrade to existing Pre and Pre plus users, then backed out of it. That kind of shaft to the installed base doesn't make them want to buy any new HP product. Not only that, the "former installed base" will shout loud to potential buyers to stay away from a product produced by a firm that is likely to shaft the customer again in the future. I'd buy an iPhone before I'd ever buy any WebOS product, and I'm an Android user who despises Apple's business practices.