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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

> but they're doing it at a better price, with far better distribution than Apple currently has, and with features that Apple hasn't managed to launch yet.

The price has not been announced and the Apple iPad 2 will release before this device! I think your enthusiasm is a bit premature.

My question is how many mobile operating systems can the market really support? Apple has a huge lead in both devices and apps but Android is catching up fast. The Touchpad might be a great device, but what good will it be when all the cool apps are on other platforms?

[Edit: Added not]

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I think you meant "...has not been..." and I agree with your points. However, one thing I have noticed among my friends and myself with apps is that there really only needs to be a few dozen apps and 80% of the planet are (is?) happy. Look at how static the top apps for ipad and iphone are month after month.

Provided porting an app to a new platform isn't too arduous then it could work out. Games especially, they are typically very easily ported since most run atop game engines that are very easily recompiled.

That said, I think Apple will eclipse HP with iPad2 and they have the 'cool' brand recognition. Think HP and you think printers still. Blackberry on the other hand...

Let's wait for the battery spec to really see how this thing will work out. Apple cut many many corners to give the ipad fabulous battery life and the video I have seen of the touchpad makes it look really slow, very unsnappy performance. Possibly they are running developer builds and it will be faster when it ships.

There's the famous quote about software features: most people only use 10% but they all use a different 10%. Windows XP SP2 was held up because Deer Hunter wouldn't run but I doubt most people on hacker news have ever even played it.

Sure, every platform might end up with a copy of Angry Birds but the more fringe the platform the smaller the selection. It's almost guaranteed that not a single innovative app or game will come to WebOS first. And who knows how long it'll take the platform to even get Angry Birds. That's a significant disadvantage to owning a Touchpad.

I'm on the fence as to whether or not HP should have used the Palm brand for all this technology. It seems a logical choice to use Palm but the HP brand implies size, money, and staying power that Palm hasn't had recently.

For what it's worth, Angry Birds was ported to webOS last summer:

http://pdnblog.palm.com/2010/08/interviewing-the-master-eagl...

The problem of multiple mobile operating systems comes from the focus on native apps. I don't use that many, instead doing almost everything over the web. This is great, as it frees me to work across my MeeGo, iOS, Maemo and Ubuntu devices as I see fit, without being stuck with any of them.

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