HP Replaces Jon Rubinstein as Head of webOS

He was just moved to a different position. Probably to a better position with a wider reach. I fail to see this as a demotion.

A shame, I have a Pre 2 and it's the best phone I have ever owned. Sure some things could be better - screen resolution for one, and battery life. But it's fast, as smooth as IOS and stable and the UI is so well thought out. There were problems with the original Pre but these have been resolved.

I also own an dual core LG 2X flashed with CyanogenMod but the WebOS UI is a class apart in terms of usability and polish. So much so that I am selling my Android. And so developer friendly - entering the Konami Code to enable developer mode FTW!

WebOS is a great product, but over the years the team at Palm and HP lead by Rubinstein have failed to fix it's core operational problems - mainly it's sluggishness and bugs. Why have those two factors been so neglected?

The resulting operating system has a great design (and very few will detest that) but fails in operational every day use due to a sub-par user experience due to lag.

I'd love to see WebOS live on. Hopefully this management change isn't too late in the game and the new guy in charge of WebOS realizes it's problems.

It seems to me like the only people hotly awaiting the arrival of the iPad killer are the tech pundits and people who desperately want to see Apple fail.

Normal people don't care. And that is why the tablets fail.. the market doesn't care, and the pundits can't _make_ them care. The dirty little secret of the tech press is that no one pays attention to it anymore.

Can't say this is much of a surprise.

I'm sure Leo Apotheker (who's seat isn't exactly safe) wasn't thrilled that Ruby got so much more press then he did with a money losing division that can't crack 2% market share.

Palm didn't hire Rubinstein, he (as part of an investment group) bought Palm. He might not even want to work at HP.

I guess the Touchpad's launch day sales weren't so stellar.

Did anyone not see this coming?

I liked WebOS and was enthused by the launch. I wanted to buy a device. I was in Taiwan, one of the world's consumer electronics centers. There were no devices. FAIL.

If you can't even distribute your product, then why bother building it? Seems like they spent so many years / so much money on R&D that their marketing failed.

I'm sorry but a forced-smile charismatic keynote (and that's being generous), even a very well presented one, cannot make up for the lack of global distribution. The US is not relevant as a leading consumer electronics market anymore. You need to either be global, or go to Asia.