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Monday, August 22, 2011

JKeene Editorial, "The Demise of WebOS and Why I bought the Touchpad





I have spent the last week following the news of the demise of webOS like many of you out there. Then came the news of the HP Touchpad firesale in which the Touchpad would be reduced hundreds of dollars to liquidate supplies. HP was closing shop on webOS after just purchasing it for $1.2 BILLION just last year. Everyone out there was buying Touchpads for $99 myself included. Before we talk tablets, what happened to the OS I knew and loved? Where did Palm go wrong?

Palm was founded in 1992 with the idea of making PDA's for consumers. Their first attempt, the Zoomer was a complete failure but the company stayed alive through various ways and was bought and sold by a number of companies during the rest of the decade. In 2000 the company went public but found itself in an odd position of having the hardware being produced by one company,palmOneInc and the software being made by Palmsource. These companies merged in 2005 and continued to produce PDA's until 2008. At CES 2009 Palm announced that they would be stepping into the mobile phone OS game with the creation of webOS and the Palm Pre. While the Pre became the fastest selling phone in Sprint's history at the time(until the Evo came along) overall it was a failure. Blackberry was the business end of smart phones, iphone had sex appeal, and Android everything in between. This left the Pre and Palm out in the cold, not to mention a marketplace with only 1500 apps. Palm was dying a slow death and was bought out by HP. This was quite a gamble by HP but they went from having nothing in the Smartphone game to having an established name in one fell swoop. This marriage did not last long as HP has just announced that they will be closing shop on their new mobile OS and with it will webOS finally meet it's maker?

Now that the history lesson is out of the way, back to the tablet. I have always wanted a tablet but with both a laptop and an Android phone I have had a hard time justifying both the price and the need for a tablet. But who really NEEDS a tablet? It is a luxury item and one I freely admit to wanting! Along comes a very nice 10" tablet for $99? Now you are talking! The HP Touchpad comes backing dualcore 1.5GHz Qualcomm processors and a tablet version of my old friend webOS. But this is an Android site you say! Don't worry Andy is going to find his way onto this Touchpad! A large number of developers out there are hard at work to port Android OS to the HP Touchpad. After seeing Android on everything from Iphones to Windows phones this is certainly not impossible. An entire crew of Developers are hard at work over at Rootzwiki with a plan to create TouchDroid! The plan is to get Gingerbread up and running in Beta then its on to Honeycomb. I will be following this project closely and don't worry readers you will be along for the ride as I aim to fire up the best performing lowest priced Android tablet ever!!! Stay tuned for more!

Editors Note: In the panel on the right you will see the Revolutionary Forum! Please sign it if you bought a touchpad and tell us what model and how much you payed for it! -Kid
JKeene
We are AndroREV, We Are!!!!


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