Dear HP: Please Keep Making Those TouchPads
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
You mean, just like the PC business they're trying to exit? And the console business that can't shoot straight because the era of $60 apps is fading fast?
Because you know, Best Buy is super excited to buy tablets from HP for just under $200 and retail them for $200 while being shut out of the app/ad/bandwidth/content ecosystem.
To make an ecosystem only strategy work today I think you need to have your own distribution network and HP isn't really in a position to burn bridges with Best Buy over the rounding error that is their tablet business.
Even I was considering buying one, and I knew I would have played with it for half an hour and then never touched it again.
People will pay $100-$200 for a dedicated eBook reader. As much as I love my iPad, it does come with a few extra things that one doesn't necessarily need. There's room in the market for a $200 tablet from a consumer point. I have no idea if it makes sense from the manufacturer's point of view, though.
That said, this recently created space [cheaper tablets] has started to be dominated by Android tablets. Can webOS find a place there? I don't know. But I think it will have a greater chance of taking on this market than the $500 range overwhelmingly handled by Apple's iPad.
edit: if they go as cheap as chips and hardware + a little more, they can also have a huge impact on basic tablets used for education, etc. in my dream world, techcrunch somehow licenses webOS and makes the CrunchPad once and for all.
double edit: in the comments someone suggested subsidizing the tablet device to lower its cost and making it up using app sales or a subscription. think game consoles. that would be interesting.
I have a 2003 version of an actual ebook reader with a passive screen. If all you are after is an ebook reader I am sure these things would sell for $20 at the most and you could make a happy profit. What a bargain eh?
The problem is that the market is not driven by people's desires, but rather by moneymakers' profits. If we can't make 25%+ on each sale, why bother?
Without providing evidence, he did say that there is a strong possibility of these devices being made at the prices he has mentioned.
It would be a lower-quality product for sure and terms like a "good enough capacitive touch screen" bother me.
These aren't crappy, low powered devices, either. Take this one: http://www.dealextreme.com/p/7-capacitive-screen-android-2-3.... It is Android 2.3, 1.2Ghz processor, HDMI out, etc etc. The only weakness is it is WiFi only, but it is only $166.
There are still supply constraints around larger 9" & 10" capacitive screens, but 7" screens are getting cheap enough now that it's possible 7" capacitive tablets will drop below $100 by the end of the year (depending on the exchange rate though..)
WebOS will never gain traction because apps on it will always be much slower than native compiled apps on iOS or even JITed apps on Android.
It's that simple. No amount of buzzword compliance is going to change that.
Just look at this benchmark:
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4658/40733.png
The device/OS which relies on JavaScript performance for everything is the slowest when it comes to JavaScript performance. :) Even if they could 2-2.5x performance, it'd still be noticeably slower than iOS or Android.
Anyone who thinks people are buying these TouchPads because they think they're a viable product is delusional at best. People are buying them because they're $99, and $99 doesn't buy you much these days.
The problem with the ToughPad was that the hardware was appallingly slow.
In fact you could start the WebOS emulator, designate a port to connect over and open your favorite browser to the IP and port of the emulator. This is how actual development is done as defined in their SDK.
Most of the people posting this ridiculous link don't know what they are talking about. Anyone can run a webos app in a browser. No one has been able to run webos outside of webOS devices.
I'm not familiar enough with webOS to know how much of the userland is written in HTML/JS/CSS, but it doesn't seem completely inconceivable. Even if it was just benchmarking of apps running standalone at more than twice the speed, that alone is pretty significant.
My first exposure to it was disabling the CDMA radio, from javascript, and enabling wifi. I was using a Sprint Pre for development in a country where only GSM exists. To get past the initial setup screen I configured the system to use wifi instead of GPRS.
The great thing about WebOS was it was open in the literal sense (unfortunately, not the license) you could modify every aspect of the system using javascript and CSS. There is nothing else like it in the world. Not Android, not WP7 and definitely not iOS
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-news/how-to-improve-the-per...
Maybe version 3 is. My Pre 2 is nice and responsive.
> WebOS will never gain traction because apps on it will always be much slower than native compiled apps on iOS or even JITed apps on Android.
JavaScript can be JITed. And you can write native code for it just fine. It's just not that much fun.
But I haven't seen any fire sales here in the UK. The cheapest I've found is for ~£160 on ebay from people who bought the $99 ones in the US.
I think I got one from Comet but it's hard to know even if I paid for it, demand has been huge and sites are being down seconds after they lower the price.
Also, people are buying them at the normal price because they know they can return them if they don't get a refund. And since stores don't want to deal with it, everyone is very confident stores will just refund it.
£89 in Dixons? Haven't been able to confirm myself.
Dear HP: Please Keep Burning Money For Our Entertainment
But I trust somehow reason will once more shine its light onto HP's board, that they will fire this idiot and abandon his silly idea of turning HP into SAP.
Android tablets will soon be sub-$200 and will come in any number of form factors, styles and configurations using an OS that actually has a chance of long term support. In fact if all you want is a web browsing device they are there already and have been for a while.
But they are using an OS that is competing directly with Apple and are therefore bad. Even if they do everything we just said we wanted for the price we said we want.
Yours, Techcrunch (especially MG Siegler).
Arrington should be a futurist/ecomonist, not a op/ed writer -- after all, he was "very right" with this prediction! :-)
But, IMHO, I think he was very wrong that Crunchpads would have flown off the shelves. Brand names matter to consumers when it comes to consumer electronics (do you hear anyone talk about the notionink Adam anymore?). You can find a $200 tablet out there if you want to, but I don't see a lot of people looking beyond the brands they already trust for a solution.
http://arnovatech.com/products/arn_10/index.html?country=us&...
people's ability to refuse to do a 30 second google search before they spout crap continues to amaze me.