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HP Unveils Veer, Pre 3, TouchPad webOS Tablet

Wireless 18 Comments

It was HP/Palm’s – or, as I sould say, HP’s – big day today. After a period of silence, the company unveiled three new webOS products – two phones, and a tablet. The Veer, a small but capable ‘mini-Pre’, the Pre 3, an updated version of the Pre with a 1.4Ghz processor, and finally, finally, finally, the webOS tablet: the HP TouchPad.

Veer and Pre 3

The Veer is clearly a device for buyers with smaller bank accounts, or for people who simply don’t want to lug around a huge smartphone. It looks exactly like a tiny Palm Pre (about the size of a credit card!), sports a 2.6″ 320×400 display, is the first to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7230 processor at 800MHz, and sports 512MB RAM. Like the Pre, it has a slide-out portrait keyboard, but at this size, I’m genuinely wondering how usable it is. It’ll be available in early spring.

The Pre 3 is the new true smartphone from HP, and again, it looks exactly like the Pres that came before it. It has a Qualcomm processor running at 1.4Ghz, 512MB RAM, a 3.6″ 480×800 display, two cameras, and the usual sensors and such. It’ll be a long wait though – available this summer. Whoops.

The webOS tablet is finally here!

On to the big one: the HP TouchPad, the long awaited and much-debated webOS tablet. It’s a 9.7″ device, with a 1024×768 resolution. The processor is a doozy – we’re looking at a dual-core 1.2Ghz Snapdragon, which is hefty by any account. It’s got 1GB of RAM, the usual sensors, two cameras, and, of course, Touch Stone compatible.

The interesting stuff here is that all these webOS devices can talk to each other – you can read text messages from your Pre on your TouchPad, and all other data, like calendars and email, will be pulled from the cloud (my first time saying cloud instead of internet. I’m sorry guys – I had to cave. I’m becoming ambiguous. My heartfelt apologies). Even notifications that arrive on your Pre 3 can be piped to your TouchPad.

It gets even cooler. Viewing a website on your TouchPad, but you have to leave and want to continue reading on the road? simply tap your Pre 3 against the TouchPad, et voilà, the site gets transferred to your Pre 3. Awesome! It’s called Touch-to-share.

The TouchPad does Flash, and in the demo, full-screen Flash video playback was reportedly very smooth. HP made several jabs about multitasking, which are well-deserved – webOS was designed from the ground up to do multitasking, as opposed to the afterthought that it is on iOS (a recently used applications list is not multitasking, Steve).

Notifications appear like Growl and are then collected in a drop down menu in the status bar. The on-screen keyboard can be resized to fit different hand sizes – thank you! My hands are incredibly small (think 13 year old girl, and I’m not kidding), so this is a nice touch.

Content-wise, HP struck a deal with Time, which will deliver Time, Fortune, People, and Sports Illustrated to the TouchPad. DreamWorks will be another content partner at launch.

The device will be launched this summer (again – that’s late). As I’m writing this, the press event is still going on, but it seems like the devices section is pretty much over. If anything interesting comes up – I’ll get back to you.

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Thom Holwerda

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18 Comments

  1. 2011-02-09 7:56 pm
    ramasubbu_sk

    Everything looks cool. Now consumer has choice, very good. Hopefully this competition will get more innovation in both hardware & software.

    Phone:

    (1) WebOS

    (2) iPhone

    (3) WP 7

    (4) Android

    Tablet:

    (1) ToughPAD – WebOS

    (2) iPAD – IoS

    (3) Android – Linux

    (4) Slate/JooJoo – Windows.

    • 2011-02-09 8:02 pm
      -pekr-

      You just totally ignored RIM’s QNX based PlayBook 🙂

    • 2011-02-09 9:17 pm
      Laurence

      Tablet:

      (1) ToughPAD – WebOS

      (2) iPAD – IoS

      (3) Android – Linux

      (4) Slate/JooJoo – Windows.

      WebOS and JooJoo are Linux (and definitely not Windows!) and you’ve capitalised iPad and iOS completely wrong (though I can forgive you for that has camel case is stupid).

      Edited 2011-02-09 21:20 UTC

      • 2011-02-09 10:42 pm
        ramasubbu_sk

        Thanks for Educating me. I don’t release the WebOS is built on top of linux. I was thinking that is the latest version of Palm OS. I feel out dated ;)

        I should see as

        With Linux there are more operating environment like

        MeeGO

        Andriod

        WebOS

        – Wow!! Interesting.

        Apart from linux, we have other

        iOS

        Windows (Windows Phone or PC version)

        Symbian (future is questionable)

      • 2011-02-09 10:45 pm
        ramasubbu_sk

        Why I mentioned JooJoo/Slate/Dell as windows is

        I saw this youtube video, then I tought there is nothing wrong for JooJoo to sell both linux & windows version.

        http://youtu.be/jLzp_xEN1ak?hd=1“

  • 2011-02-09 8:02 pm
    holivega

    The phones and the tablet look really nice!

  • 2011-02-09 8:12 pm
    Kroc Silver Supporter

    HP just bet the farm on WebOS. A true IBM move.

    • 2011-02-09 10:06 pm
      umccullough

      HP just bet the farm on WebOS. A true IBM move.

      I’m not sure “bet the farm” is applicable here – at least not until every HP device is running WebOS ;)

  • 2011-02-09 9:28 pm
    fran

    This was probably one of the biggest bomb shells

    http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/09/webos-is-coming-to-pcs-later-thi…

  • 2011-02-09 9:58 pm
    Praxis

    The videos demos made these look sweet. The phone is just as smooth as ever, hopefully the hardware will be a little better. The tablet is great, much better than honeycomb by the looks of things. Android went with too much flash and not enough substance. The multitasking is sooo much better than any other tablet or in the market or in the pipeline from what they’ve shown today. I was rather disappointed that honeycomb multitasking was pretty much just a recently used applications list. Android does allow homescreen widgets though, which is a plus. I didn’t see any homescreen widget like functions with webos, though perhaps a customized card could work instead.

  • 2011-02-09 10:13 pm
    robco

    The Veer looks cute, I hope we see a CDMA version for Sprint and Verizon soon. The new tablet isn’t bad either.

    But I think this is going to come down to apps. HP needs to be doing anything and everything to get developers to write apps for these. Otherwise, this is just a nice exercise. So far Android Marketplace and Blackberry AppWorld remain far behind Apple’s App Store.

    Pricing will also be an important factor, one that wasn’t mentioned today…

  • 2011-02-09 10:54 pm
    ronaldst

    Why doesn’t everybody have one already is a mystery to me. Jesus, the WebOS UI is drop dead sexy. The cards user interface is plain genius. It solves the last problem with non-WIMP full screen UIs. The UI itself makes everything out there look bland and old (except the gorgeous text based Metro UI).

    Even the Veer is nice.

    Now HP just needs to advertise the damn thing.

  • 2011-02-09 11:28 pm
    mrhasbean

    …that it is on iOS (a recently used applications list is not multitasking, Steve)

    OK, so share your definition of multitasking then Thom. Here’s mine.

    When a person multitasks, what do they do? They have a number of things on the go and move between them, leaving each “task” to continue without interaction while some time is dedicated to another.

    For example, the other night I was making this nice baked fish and prawn (shrimp) recipe I found on allrecipes. I was watching Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps while cooking and received a notification about a message on Facebook, a question about some travel plans we’re making. So I whipped into Facebook to check the message and while there decided to update my wall to see what else had been happening, found that my son, whom the Facebook message was from, wanted a copy of a PDF we’d been reading a few nights prior with some relevant travel info on it, so popped into my browser and chucked in a Google search to find it, tapped the link to load the PDF, quickly checked Facebook, which had by that stage updated my wall, then went back to cooking.

    I’d forgotten where I was up to in the recipe, so had to recheck that, grabbed out the implements needed for the next step, whacked a pot on low heat with the butter in it, by that time the PDF was downloaded so I saved it, popped into Mail, attached and sent it, sent my son a quick SMS to tell him to check his email, rechecked the recipe due to my Goldfish memory, then went back to watching the movie, which was right where I left it, while finishing off the cooking.

    And the kicker, all except the cooking was done on my iPhone. Apps used, in order of appearance: iPod, AllRecipes, Facebook, Safari, Facebook again, AllRecipes again, Safari again, Mail, Messages, AllRecipes again, iPod again – all continued to “do their stuff” while I went about mine.

    Can it have 100 apps all open at once as you would on say your home computer? Nope, but for the average user, that’s pretty much multitasking right there, and the way it’s implemented even the average user can get their head around it…

    • 2011-02-11 12:37 pm
      ricegf

      “When a person multitasks, what do they do? They have a number of things on the go and move between them, leaving each “task” to continue without interaction while some time is dedicated to another.”

      That’s human multitasking. Operating system multitasking is when the computer is able to execute an arbitrary number of user programs concurrently.

      Allowing a user program to save its state when focus shifts to another program, and restore its state and resume when focus returns, is not multitasking, no matter what spells Mr. Jobs may have spun within his famous field to confuse the matter.

      For example, to use iOS as is in a corporate environment typically requires establishing and maintaining a virtual private network through the corporate firewall. A user would enter a security token to the VPN program, and the tunnel is established and maintained while the user communicates with corporate data systems. The tunnel must be actively maintained, or the firewall will close it.

      On Windows XP or Red Hat Linux (both of which actually multitask), establishing the tunnel is a one-time event per computing session, and a background task maintains the tunnel regardless of which app has focus. Good.

      The problem with iOS is that, when user focus shifts to another app, the tunnel is lost (because Steve forgot to add “maintain encrypted tunnels” to the short list of 5 things the operating system is able to maintain while a program is out of focus). This means, when the VPN app returns to focus, it must collect another token and then re-establish the tunnel.

      The practical effect is that if the user switches focus to another program for even a second, or if the tablet sleeps for even a second, he or she must re-enter a token and wait for another encrypted tunnel to be formed and the interface to update.

      Bad.

      If you ask why Good doesn’t simply save the token in persistent storage while out of focus, then go back to Computer Security 101 and pay attention this time! If the token is based on a one-time pad cypher (strong security), it can only be used once; saving it won’t help. If it’s a static password (rather weak security), then persistent storage on a mobile device is a security breach just waiting to happen. The only way to create sufficient usability is to maintain the tunnel while the app is out of focus, and iOS can’t.

      Woops.

      I could list more usability problems caused by lack of multitasking, but you get the idea. Pretending to multitask isn’t the same as multitasking, and multitasking was invented for many good reasons.

      Don’t get me wrong – the iPad is a very nice consumer device for people baking fish and prawns. But iOS 4.2 is unsuitable for use in an Enterprise setting.

      Because it does not multitask.

      Edited 2011-02-11 12:46 UTC

    • 2011-02-12 12:06 am
      phoenix

      That’s not multitasking, that’s just intelligent task switching. You only have 1 app running at a time.

      Multitasking is when you have multiple apps/processes running at the same time.

      As in, start the music player, send it to the background, and continue to have music playing.

      Bring up the browser, start a bunch of file downloads, send it to the background, and continue to download the files.

      Bring up a document viewer, edit a document, start the print process, send it to the background, and it continues to print.

      Bring up a terminal app, connect via SSH to a remote server, start tailing a log file, send the terminal app to the background, and have it continue to stream the log file in the background.

      And so on.

      Multitasking means running more than one app concurrently. Not just switching between apps, while only the foreground app is running.

  • 2011-02-10 4:17 am
    Moochman

    I really don’t understand how “Summer” is late. Heck, it’s only been a few months since they Pre 2 came out! How impatient have we become in this day and age? Good things take time!

  • 2011-02-10 1:34 pm
    mweichert

    It feels like I’ve been waiting and waiting to see what HP would do with Palm. After the acquisition, I was telling everyone “HP is gonna do great things with Palm; you’ll see – webOS is superior!” and then had everyone point and laugh when they released the Pre2… what a disappointment. Finally, we’re starting to see some good comes come out of all of this. I don’t know what I want.. Pre3, TouchPad, or both, but I’m getting something! ;)

    Have to say though, it’s better incredibly tough for a guy that only keeps on top of the mobile news once or twice a month to know which platform to go with these days. Nokia is out, though once in a while I’m intrigued about developing with Qt Mobile, but iOS, webOS, and Android all are fairly comparable and have their own strengths and weaknesses. If webOS had more exposure, and was available on multiple devices, then I think personally had has the potential to really take off. I think HP understood this when they decided to take webOS to PCs and laptops, hoping to get more large-screen apps to help with creating a presence in the tablet market.

    It’s very exciting right now in the world of mobile development. It’s times like these I’m glad I decided on the career of a software developer because it’s absolutely impossible for me to become bored in such a rapidly evolving playground.

    Cheers,

    Mike

  • 2011-02-10 5:12 pm
    Adurbe

    whats wrong with announcing when a product is Ready? At the very least available on pre-order.

    A PRE3 would suit my needs perfectly.. but I am in line to upgrade in a couple of months. Will I wait? Doubt it.. my BB Bold has served its duty so would quite like a new toy.