The HP TouchPad | Hacker News Reader

The HP TouchPad

engadget.com

44 pointsRoritharr34 comments

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).

When will they announce the new iPad, btw?

WSJ today said "next couple of months" http://on.wsj.com/dYaPqw

> When will they announce the new iPad, btw?

Yearly cycle and no reason to pre-announce the iPad 2, so I'd expect announce and immediate availability for late march to early april.

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.

Anyone else notice the very "Apple" presentation style?

No mention of price yet? I kind of take that as a bad sign.

I'm very glad to see this space expand. I have a couple elderly relatives that I have considered buying a tablet/slate to replace their computers.

Product without price is no product.

No point announcing a price when they're so far away from shipping and they don't know what iPad 2's price is gonna be.

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.

Well Jon Rubinstein was an apple employee for 9 years (left in 2006) so I'd think an Apple like presentation style is to be expected.

Good call, I missed that. Makes sense.

I bet they're waiting for the iPad 2, and will price it to be competitive with whatever Apple announces.

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.

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.

If they went with Android, what would distinguish their tablet from the 120 other tablets demoed at CES?

Besides, the Honeycomb demo (imo) did not look nearly as nice as the TouchPad demo.

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

> If Android is maturing quickly and free-as-in-speech, why wouldn't HP simply adopt that?

1. So they don't depend on an other corporations with views, needs and direction separate from theirs.

2. Because WebOS is a better OS than Android.

3. Because they're tired of their status as a "me too" corporation.

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.

Just to give links to the wikipedia pages for the not so recognizable audio codecs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Efficiency_Advanced_Audio_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QCELP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_audio_codec

Since no price was mentioned, and given the tech specs, what's the maximum price HN'ers would pay for the TouchPad? Any takers?

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.

$400. I might pay a bit more, but I'd love to see it at a $299 price point. Or perhaps an ability to buy in bulk for client projects at $299.

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.

$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.

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.

$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?)

Awesome! Now we only need to develop for iOS, Android, QNX/BlackBerry OS, Windows Phone 7, and WebOS.

;-)

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.

Only if you don't care about user experience.

Ah, if only we could go back to a time where you only had to program for one platform, like Win32.

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