Granted the software looks very cool and highlights some of the weaknesses of iOS and the iPad. But it's worrisome that there was no talk of price or battery life and availability was listed as "summer" for wifi and "later" for 3G. I fear the Touchpad will be lapped by the upcoming iPad refresh before it even hits. And how much air went out of the Xoom balloon as soon as the $800 price tag leaked? The iPad definitely needs some strong competition but I am afraid this may not be it.
I think that they'll announce the pricing about when the iPad 2 buzz has died down a bit after that has been announced. That'll let them set the price low enough, if Apple has any more surprises in that area (people expected the iPad to be a lot more expensive).
I don't think that waiting til iPad 2 pricing is out will help them magically hit the right price point, at all. This assumes that they can make a competitive product at a cost that lets them profit from it. Big assumption; nobody seems to be very good at that trick just yet. That's why their delivery date is still in Vapormonth, Two Thousand And Soon.
Free preview: $500. And $100 increments for more storage.
Apple history suggests they don't change price, they let Moore's law and software updates sweeten the deal.
They're absolutely killing it at their current prices and would-be competitors are apparently unable to build a comparable device for less. Why would they go off-script?
The charge for cellular capability is the only real question mark, but I'm guessing it remains a ~$100 premium.
i was excited about webOS when it first came out, but the crappy palm pre devices prevented me from adopting it. from everything they've shown during their event today, i'm pretty excited about this new tablet.
i like the integration with the palm pre and being able to transfer calls, text messages, and web pages between the two. i'm glad hp is focusing on integration with existing web services and presenting them all together rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and push customers towards their own services like apple does with mobileme, itunes, ibooks, and facetime, and google does with just about every app they make for android.
I mentioned this in the other submission, but is "vibrant 18 bit" display just spec jargon for a cheap TN panel? 6-bits for each R, G, and B? The IPS panel in the iPad is a huge selling point for Apple. It is higher quality than almost any modern laptop screen.
This looks like a consumer device, and it's going to be a hard fight when Apple is king and prepared to sacrifice margins to defend this territory.
The TouchPad hasn't clearly defined it's USP.
Furthermore, Apple is hiring people to get into corporate sales. This is where HP has somewhat more experience in. It's going to be hard to develop the ecosystem.
I'm not sure I understand the point of webOS. If Android is maturing quickly and free-as-in-speech, why wouldn't HP simply adopt that?
I can understand Apple carving out their own proprietary path, because of their legions of fans and widely accepted interface design patterns. I can also understand Microsoft putting Windows 7 on tablets (because people want to run MS applications that already exist). But why would I want webOS? Are they trying to be like Apple and blaze an entirely new trail?
It seems like it would have been smarter for HP to go with Android. The cost surely would have been cheaper and the product would have had a greater chance at gaining acceptance.
The point is to control your own destiny. HP has been stuck behind MS for the past 20 years. They couldn't innovate on hardware w/o MS.
This would just trade one devil for another devil. Even though Android is open source, development happens in isolation. Even with HoneyComb Google only gave Moto access. So Samsung, LG, HTC, Accer -- no Honeycomb for you yet. Moto gets special treatment.
If you're HP do you want to get in bed with a company who may decide that Motorola or Dell or Lenovo is the "preferred" partner? Do you want to have to throttle your development (or develop on an old version of Android) to introduce your latest HW innovation.
HP can finally own the full stack... ala Apple. And honestly, I think HP looks at what Apple has done and thinks, "We can do a lot of what they do. Maybe without the style -- but enough to put us beyond all of the Android clones".
Good luck to them, but contrast HP with Nokia. Unless they execute extremely well on the OS, store, dev tools, and price they will be releasing a memo like this eventually http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520
Presumably because HP wants to control their own fate. They've seen what happened to their PC division in the race-to-the-bottom Windows world, why would they want to sign up to do that all over again with the same razor thin margins and anemic profits that every Android hardware vendor other than HTC is experiencing?
WebOS gives them a real differentiator and a chance to build an ecosystem they can grow and control, rather than just half-assing it with Android re-skin #17.
I hope HP has a plan for reaching out to consumers and getting them to look at the TouchPad because the Apple Stores are doing a very good job at it. People get to use the device and can make a purchase decision easily.
If its almost as "good" as the iPad, and more open (there are so many things you can't do on the iOS platform), I would pay a premium of say $100.
But I suspect it will be quite a while before anyone else can even match the iPad1, let alone what iPad2 will be like. Apple's products are soooooo much better (if you ignore the shortcomings, which are 90% of the time deliberate) it's almost like alien technology. I am a Microsoft guy, but I love Apple's products lately.
$450. Has to be cheaper than the iPad2, especially since the iPad2 may come in at 1.25lbs. At $450 they have a hit on their hands. At $600 they struggle to move them.
Max == as much as the iPad (which ever model is out when this actually ships). I think most will agree the TouchPad will be out when the iPad 2 is, and based on rumors the hardware should be comparable. It then becomes a question of which OS/apps you prefer but that's not enough that one device should be priced much more than the other.
$10 so my beautiful ($250) vacuum cleaner can look down to it.
In all seriousness, they would have to pay me $50/day (minimum) to carry such a heavy, ugly, thick and totally uninspiring gadget around. What has become of a company which bought Compaq just a few years ago? (or,wait, was it the other way around?)
What's the point, though, at any price point? It's vapor ware, looks like a thick and heavy Samsung Galaxy tab rip-off and it doesn't even run Android. Maybe hospitals can make use of it if it's dish-washer proof but other than that it's a liability, not a product.
Luckily all those platforms support HTML 5 and on WebOS you can easily deploy your HTML 5 app as a native app and take advantage of the native functionality as well.
