Guardian Reports WebOS Days Are Numbered

http://allthingsd.com/20111101/hp-has-no-easy-answers-for-webos/

Besides, there's no evidence that even at the reduced price the Touch Pad was successfully competing with the iPad. iPad sales weren't affected. It was other Android tablets that saw sales fall.

1.2Ghz TI OMAP CPU, 16gb internal storage + microSDHC slot and a pretty good IPS 7" 1024x600 screen and a standard microUSB connector makes this a hacker's dream budget device!

I personally love the 7" to 8.9" formfactor tablets so I cannot wait to see some serious entries in this segment (iPad/Touchpad are too bulky no matter how thin they are) . Such a shame we never saw a smaller Touchpad variant. HP still should have gone on and pushed the Touchpad Go into production. Early Q1 of 2012 would have been a better time to kill off WebOS.
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I think the lack of any reasonable competition is going to keep Apple making incremental upgrades. We'll probably see an iPad 2S for early 2012 with a gig of RAM, a 1.2Ghz CPU, Siri, and the usual thinner/lighter formfactor tweaks.

Right now my plan is to either make do with one of the current crop of Android devices and hope that ICS/4.0 is an improvement over the disastrous Honeycomb OR snag a Galaxy Tab 7 Plus or 7.7 since those are simply superb formfactors. Quad-core Kal-El tablets are absolutely pointless, as Android cannot even properly utilize 2 cores, and hardware acceleration is nowhere to be found and/or poorly implemented in all current pre-ICS devices. All of the extra CPU power will be negated by the the manufacturers' and carrier bloatware and Google's coding inefficiencies and poor memory management.

I think Win 8 may even go over better in tablets than on traditional PCs. Win 7 is "good enough" for 99.9% of users and will probably be the next XP, far outliving its its original EOL date.
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Just noticed recently that the bastards at Apple were planning to deactivate the Siri app that I've had on my iPhone 4 for over a year. How clever of them. Yet another reason why I don't care for Apple as a company. If only there was another phone out there with as nice a screen/design as the iPhone 4 and could run iOS apps..

Looked at the Pre 3 on eBay last week - you can get one for $200 or so. Tempted to get one, but the lack of apps is a showstopper. I don't mind carrying 2 devices, but I can't justify carrying a Pre 3 when the iPhone 4 does so much more than the Pre 3 and is around the same size.

My TouchPad is now relegated to Internet browsing when sitting on the couch at home and occasional email. Still, for $150 I don't regret having bought it.

Tried out the new wedge-shaped Sony tablet today. The shape and weight actually make it easy to hold and it feels unusually well-balanced in the hand. Too bad it's running nasty old Android! In the end it's yet another tablet that's priced essentially the same as iPad and is doomed to fail just like the Xoom, PlayBook, Galaxy Tab(s), TouchPad, Toshiba pad, etc. have all failed over the past 2 years. The only way to compete with iPad for the forseeable future will probably be to either sell at a loss (TouchPad, Amazon tablet, eventually PlayBook) or have Windows 8 installed. All the Johnny Come Latelys (RIM, Sony, etc.) that jumped blindly like lemmings into the tablet market without an intelligent strategy are going to get massacred in 2011-12 when they realize that the promise of massive tablet-derived profits was just a mirage. RIM hasn't yet killed off the PlayBook because doing so too quickly would have been even more of an embarrassment, but they appear to have finally realized that they need to focus their (dwindling) resources away from the bloodsucking PlayBook and onto getting their slick little QNX OS stable enough to ship with all of their future phones. Focusing on the PlayBook at the expense of developing a next-generation OS was a potentially fatal mistake for RIM, just as how Palm's distraction with the Foleo at the expense of developing PalmLinux or webOS was ultimately responsible for the death of Palm as an independent company. Stange how these companies never seem to learn from the past.

One last random observation: at what point does the cost of the supposedly "free" Android outweigh it's benefits to manufacturers? They currently have to pay a licensing fee to Microsoft and Google is going to eventually lose its fight with "Looney" Larry Ellison/Oracle over its Java theft. Apple's case against Android is also pending. If manufacturers end up having to pay say $20 in various licensing fees per Android device and a Windows Phone 7 license costs say $10 per device, will they dump Android en masse? Go back to their own OSes like Bada, Symbian, etc; buy webOS (helloooooo HTC!!!); develop a true royalty-free open source OS; fork Android (Amazon)? 2012 may be remembered as the year that Android turned around (T-1000-style) and bit a LOT of naïve, greedy manufacturers in the a$$...

Fake Jeff Hawkins

When you look the upgrades that the rest of the industry is making to their devices, it makes these Apple upgrades look monumental. Incremental upgrades are 1.2 to a 1.6GHz bump and there are tons of those in the smartphone industry. The problem with all of these non iOS devices is they don't offer an end to end solution. If you have a bump in gpu/cpu speed then provide a useful application for it (not a demo). Without an application then all you have is a new pocket warmer. The majority of the consumers do give a rat's ass about GHz. Everyone reading this might but you are not the majority. The Android smartphone makers are in the same frame of mind as the Sega Saturn creators (not the actual engineers but the suits). Just jam in another CPU and we can call 32bit or dual processing!

Also this is not just about hardware and software but content. This is the only way that Apple (and Amazon) are going to continue to maintain a lead. The hardware manufacturers release a device which will blow away the current competition not the one that is coming soon. The only iOS device killer will be the next iOS device and this will continue until someone decides to make a real investment into the industry. It will not be Microsoft even though they seem to be making the most money from the Android market!

The worst feature I have seen on a smartphone is 3D. Sure it looks good but you have a battery life that can't get past 40 minutes of a non-streaming movie.

The best of the real HP is on the iPad, they should realize that you need to innovate to stay in the game.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/i41cx-rpn-calculator-printer/id289068865?mt=8

Gary
http://www.BattSix.com
Tech Center Labs
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I myself now have a Bionic, since I felt it might be the final VZW LTE device to have the holy trinity of a dedicated microHDMI port (new devices are trending to those horrid MHL adapters or no video-out at all), expandable storage and a removable battery. Add to that the forthcoming ICS release for the Bionic and you have a pretty solid no-frills handset for people who value maximum productivity and expandability over sleekness.

I carried a Treo with the big Seidio "rumpshaker" battery back in the day and carried 2 devices (PDA + big AMPS cell phone) back in the original Pilot days, so having a Bionic with a an extended battery is a non-issue for me.

Also, I hope to have some more time to devote to PIC in the coming days so keep checking back in! Happy Thanksgiving to all!
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