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The death of WebOS

radiogoober said:
There is no tablet market. There is only iPad.
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If that were true it would be bad for the consumer. Thankfully you are wrong since Android tablets are great. I own the Asus Transformer and it's as good as an iPad and also much cheaper.
 
radiogoober said:
Well it seems as though we can consider the HP TouchPad dead. WebOS is dead.

http://gizmodo.com/5831594/best-buy-has-200k-unsold-touchpads-wants-hp-to-take-them-back

They literally can't give thes tablets away. Even with huge discounts. That is both hilarious and pathetic.

There is no tablet market. There is only iPad.
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This post reeks of fanboyism.

I own an iPad but to say that the iPad is the only tablet on the market is purely favoritism. Competition is a good thing.
 
I've used all of the Honeycomb tablets and the Touchpad...they are all too buggy. It just doesn't work right all the time.

iPad is a finished product while all of the others are experimental.
 
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The TP isn't a bad device. I owned one. What needs to happens is, HP should lower the price to $299. This should be the permanent price of device. They should take a loss, or maybe break even on this first generation device. It was going to fail from the beginning. It had no business starting at $499 (iPad, Tab 10.1) pricing; now at $399, the Transformer, is still a much better buy.

Price it at $299 at Best Buy & force people to want to pick one up. At that price, people would want one.
 
nfl46 said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A5288d Safari/7534.48.3)

The TP isn't a bad device. I owned one. What needs to happens is, HP should lower the price to $299. This should be the permanent price of device. They should take a loss, or maybe break even on this first generation device. It was going to fail from the beginning. It had no business starting at $499 (iPad, Tab 10.1) pricing; now at $399, the Transformer, is still a much better buy.

Price it at $299 at Best Buy & force people to want to pick one up. At that price, people would want one.
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I bought one at that price two weeks ago from Staples, returned it the other day.
 
They'll come along. Android remains a popular platform and WebiOS has a lot of outstanding features that give it potential. I wouldn't count them out yet, but I also don't plan on buying one anytime soon.
 
palpatine said:
They'll come along. Android remains a popular platform and WebiOS has a lot of outstanding features that give it potential. I wouldn't count them out yet, but I also don't plan on buying one anytime soon.
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People always say how they have potential. And that's all they ever have.
 
Steviolol said:
People always say how they have potential. And that's all they ever have.
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That's true. They only put out their product a few weeks ago, so I think we'll need to give them a bit of time to get up to speed.

Android is doing pretty well. Asus has strong sales numbers, and there is even a chunk of support for Samsung.

Thank goodness GM is the only car maker on the road today, because you know they once dominated the car market, right? Oh yeah, and then there is Windows...
 
It is extremely hard to overcome a company that has a significant first-mover advantage, particularly when that company has the resources that Apple has. Even though tablets have technically been around for over 10 years, the tablet market was "re-created" last year with the iPad and the general consumer sees the "tablet" and the iPad as one and the same. To make matters worse (for Apple competitors), Apple launched the iPad with a very healthy developer and media ecosystem supporting it. It's an ecosystem that no one can emulate at the moment. So competitors face a tremendous uphill battle to convince consumers to buy the "un-iPad" and also accept a relative lack of compelling content. Good hardware will only take you so far.
 
There are strengths and weaknesses in any market position. Ask Sony (what happened to their dominance in the mobile music player market?), ask Windows (what happened to IE's dominance), ask Yahoo (what happened to their search dominance), etc.

As we have seen with the smart phone market (that Apple dominated only a short time ago), it is possible to gain significant market share even if you are years behind in development. For tablets, all Google + hardware manufacturers have to do is show that they have a viable product at a lower price. They have got pretty good hardware (equivalent to the PC v Apple situation) and so-so OS, but (as you said) they lack the apps. It will come and Apple will lose huge chunks of its market share.

But, if Apple is smart (and I think they are), they will have already moved on to something else, and I bet they find a way to bring along a bunch of the customers they have managed to get tied into their ecosystem. INTEGRATION is the key, not the tablet.

Who cares about the iPad, when you have people hooked into all of your product lines?

People that point to iPhone sales, iPad sales, or any other single product are missing the point. Even if HP gobbled up a bunch of customers, they've got nothing else to offer. Neither does Android. The so-called "halo" effect with Apple is pretty powerful, and at this point I don't see any competitors (Sony and others have tried) who can come close to matching them in this regard. In other words, they can afford to lose market share in any line, and it won't have a significant impact on sales.
 
nfl46 said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A5288d Safari/7534.48.3)

The TP isn't a bad device. I owned one. What needs to happens is, HP should lower the price to $299. This should be the permanent price of device. They should take a loss, or maybe break even on this first generation device. It was going to fail from the beginning. It had no business starting at $499 (iPad, Tab 10.1) pricing; now at $399, the Transformer, is still a much better buy.

Price it at $299 at Best Buy & force people to want to pick one up. At that price, people would want one.
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If you read the Gizmodo article you would see that the price of the TP (toilet paper!) doesn't matter. No one was buying it no matter what the price. You could make it for $100 and it would still sit on the shelf like the unwanted POS that it is.

I'm glad you owned one. Apparently you're one of the very few who did!

palpatine said:
They'll come along. Android remains a popular platform and WebiOS has a lot of outstanding features that give it potential. I wouldn't count them out yet, but I also don't plan on buying one anytime soon.
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You're right. The TP does have some good features. It works really good as a paperweight. It also is a nice blunt object to use for home defense. It also works as a hammer to hit nails with. And if my dog poops on the ground it's good to clean that up with.
 
I also am starting to think the other issue is not only did people clearly know of iPad first, and got their nice marketing campaign; it also came with an acceptable price tag. You don't sell in such high numbers to simply apple fans. This is selling to mainstreamers.

However, I don't think this issue is purely with Apple. But with too many competitors attempting to flood the tablet market at the same time. They're clearly competing with each other, with the same kind of spec-based campaigns. It's confusing the consumers, and being wary of money spending, they'd rather hold back than to take the jump. Plus, who is to say that the HP tablet isn't losing to Android's campaign? So you have Apple clearly in the lead, and then you have the other market kind of tearing at each other for the rest of the share. There has to be some losers, there. A case of too many people, at one time, without clearly advertising what makes them significantly different to an average consumer. You know. The ones that hardly know what the heck dual core is, and what significance it has on performance on a machine they don't know about.
 
radiogoober said:
If you read the Gizmodo article you would see that the price of the TP (toilet paper!) doesn't matter. No one was buying it no matter what the price. You could make it for $100 and it would still sit on the shelf like the unwanted POS that it is.

I'm glad you owned one. Apparently you're one of the very few who did!



You're right. The TP does have some good features. It works really good as a paperweight. It also is a nice blunt object to use for home defense. It also works as a hammer to hit nails with. And if my dog poops on the ground it's good to clean that up with.
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People said the same thing about Apple's iBook attempt to break into the laptop market. So quickly we forget that early efforts are the first steps on the road, and as long as the other tablet makers keep putting one foot in front of the other, they'll provide competition and (hopefully) push Apple to improve its products as well.
 
If anyone else other then HP purchased Palm, then I'd say they would have a great chance of extending and growing webos.

HP's track records for these types of things has not been stellar. Reference the iPaq when HP purchased compaq. That was a great PDA back in the day but HP failed to parlay early successes into a solid product line.
 
radiogoober said:
They literally can't give thes tablets away. Even with huge discounts. That is both hilarious and pathetic.

There is no tablet market. There is only iPad.
Click to expand...
You say that as if its a good thing.

Its funny how a decade ago people considered Microsoft to e the evil Empire, but in the end Apple is the company that will actually build a Death Star (probably after they're done with that mothership).


As someone happily entrenched in Apples ecosystem then I'll continue to buy Apple products because they really are better than the rest, but t's very short sighted to think that Apples success is good for the industry.
 
mkruck said:
Dead?

Really?

Odd. When I woke up this morning, my TouchPad was working fine.
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I don't think anyone will really argue that its not a bad product but rather HP's marketing machine is failing. The tablets are not selling, their phones are not selling and the last time I looked there is a dearth of apps available.

Perception is 9/10s of the law, or something like that :p The consumer perception appears to exclude Palm products from their decision making process.
 
maflynn said:
I don't think anyone will really argue that its not a bad product but rather HP's marketing machine is failing. The tablets are not selling, their phones are not selling and the last time I looked there is a dearth of apps available.

Perception is 9/10s of the law, or something like that :p The consumer perception appears to exclude Palm products from their decision making process.
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No doubt about it, which is one of the reasons that I still have my iPad, and won't be giving it up anytime soon. The TouchPad was a total impulse buy last weekend, and it's fun to play with. My "go-to" device is still the iPad, and it looks like it will be that way for a long, long time to come.

Despite all the pro-Android analysts statements, I honestly don't think that Apple's lead in the tablet race is going to be overcome.
 
mkruck said:
Despite all the pro-Android analysts statements, I honestly don't think that Apple's lead in the tablet race is going to be overcome.
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I think at some point, some android makers are going to strike the right balance of price, design, and apps to give apple a run for their money. So I do see apple's lead shrinking at some point. So far I've not seen any tablets in the marketplace that have the right combination of price/features that does that.

I'm surprised to see a complete lack of windows tablets as well, with all the talk Balmer as given about tablets and they had produced tablets before why is it a year later and we see nothing. Not that I want a windows tablet - just curious
 
maflynn said:
I think at some point, some android makers are going to strike the right balance of price, design, and apps to give apple a run for their money. So I do see apple's lead shrinking at some point. So far I've not seen any tablets in the marketplace that have the right combination of price/features that does that.

I'm surprised to see a complete lack of windows tablets as well, with all the talk Balmer as given about tablets and they had produced tablets before why is it a year later and we see nothing. Not that I want a windows tablet - just curious
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Shrinking, most definitely, but unless there's some major advances waiting in the wings (and ICS is definitely not it), the iPad is the standard that everyone will try to beat.

I did the Xoom/Galaxy Tab 10.1 thing for 3 months, earlier this year. With Honeycomb, there is that "gee whiz" factor for the first few weeks, but outside of that, it ended up being a clunky, not finished user experience, which really manifested itself on the Apps side rather than the OS. My biggest gripe with the Android experience was at the presentation layer - 75% of the apps I bought we just flat out ugly, and I believe that comes from being totally spoiled by using iOS for some many years.

Oddly, that's the one of the things that the TouchPad does well - everything looks very polished and runs as advertised. Now, if there were just some apps...

The other deal killer for me was the form factor. The 10.1" screen didn't lend itself to portrait orientation, which is the predominant way I hold my iPad. Just way too narrow, and felt odd.
 
maflynn said:
If anyone else other then HP purchased Palm, then I'd say they would have a great chance of extending and growing webos.
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HP has an established worldwide distribution channel, enterprise visibility, tons of money and a strong desire to enter the tablet arena. Their long term plans for WebOS, which includes creating hybrid win/webos PC's and even establishing product lines that can one day be Microsoft Free is interesting. Im not fond of HP at all but I think HP is one of the few companies that actually could have save Palm but in the end it all came down to poor execution... again.

HP's biggest blunder here is that they were in such a rush that instead of following a natural progression by releasing the Pre3 -> Touchpad -> Veer they went backwards and sabotaged their own gameplan and managed to sink both their cellphone and tablet markets with a single torpedo. And its a shame because of all the mobile OS's, WebOS probably had the most elegant and efficient UI.
 
urkel said:
HP has an established worldwide distribution channel, enterprise visibility, tons of money and a strong desire to enter the tablet arena. .
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No one is arguing that HP is large. The question is can they properly market a tablet to entice consumers and enterprise customers to embrace it. So far the answer has been no. They've largely failed at selling the Pre as well so a worldwide distribution channel doesn't help anyone when customers choose another product.
 
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