WebOS is Dead!

After all the bad press that the HP TouchPad can I say I am not surprised when HP announces the following:

HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones.

They do say…

HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.

I think that this is basically the death of WebOS. It doesn’t surprise me one little bit.

WebOS was initially developed by Palm before it was acquired by HP. Though the Palm Pre received very positive reviews, the HP TouchPad did not. There was complaints about how slow it was as well as the lack of apps for the device. Probably the big story that killed the TouchPad was the report that Best Buy who had 270,000 TouchPads had in fact only sold 25,000 and wanted HP to take the remainder back…

So though it was cheaper than the iPad, people were still buying the iPad, you couldn’t blame the economy for the poor TouchPad sales.

When I managed a very limited try of the TouchPad in my local Staples though I did find it slightly sluggish, I did quite like the interface and user experience. Certainly better than some of the Android 2.x tablets that were alongside the TouchPad. Probably didn’t help that it wasn’t connected to the internet and had no example apps on it.

However talking to others who used it there thoughts were that it was nice, but it was no iPad. I have heard similar things about Android tablets too, including those that run Honeycomb.

Personally I have had similar experiences with touchscreen phones. The LG Viewty for example was a horrible phone compared to the first iPhone from a user experience perspective, even if it did have a much better camera and other features.

It would appear that HP was losing a lot of money with WebOS and decided that killing, sorry discontinuing the devices they were making was the only option open to them.

It is a pity in one respect, good competitive devices keep Apple on their toes and gets Apple to innovate and improve their devices. Or maybe that’s what Apple does anyway, regardless of what the competition does…

I haven’t yet seen a serious competitor to the iPad at this time, have you?


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