Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Palm HP has finally officially announced the release of the TouchPad! Sadly though, it will only see a phased roll-out over the remainder of the year, and the number of countries actually getting the TouchPad is remarkably limited. Somewhat of a downer, really.
After weeks of intensive speculation on Palm/webOS-centric forums about the release date of HP’s tablet, the company has finally sent out a press release spilling all the beans. The device will hit the US market on July 1, followed a few days later by the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and Germany. The TouchPad will hit Canada mid-July, and Italy, Spain, Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Singapore will follow later this year.
Well, that surely kills any excitement I had right dead. I know it’s not trivial to ship products to all manner of countries right away, but ignoring large parts of Europe while Android tablets and the iPad further entrance themselves without restrictions on availability? Doesn’t seem like a good move to me, but alas, what do I know. At least it seals the deal for me – iPad 2 it is. I’m not going to import a product that has no native support (no application store, no support lines, etc.). I’m looking at you, HTC HD7.
Anywho, pricing is looking pretty good: $499 for the 16GB model, and $599 for the 32GB one. Those are both the WiFi-only models; the 3G models will arrive later this year. HP will be working together with AT&T in the US on the launch of the 3G models – no word yet on carriers in other parts of the world.
“What makes HP TouchPad a compelling alternative to competing products is webOS,” said Jon Rubinstein, “The platform’s unmatched features and flexibility will continue to differentiate HP products from the rest of the market for both personal and professional use. This is only the beginning of what HP’s scale can do with webOS.”
I guess that doesn’t include a world-wide launch. HP is already behind Apple on this one, and while I know a worldwide simultaneous release is difficult to manage, you’d think a large company like HP could pull it off. Two years and counting, still not a single webOS product in The Netherlands.
What a downer.
Cool toy. I hope they manage to knock one out of the park with the marketing.
These look nice, but with an Android phone, I’d have to go with an Android tablet. I imagine others will think the same, be they iPhone or Android users. So, I think they might be too late. Thom, why would you even want to pair a Windows phone with a WebOS tablet? You’d have to buy apps twice etc.
Edited 2011-06-09 15:25 UTC
Actually, nothing could be further from the truth in my case. Since I have an Android phone, I am seriously considering an iPad when the next one comes out. That way, I have access to apps in both ecosystems.
That being said though, I have little to know interest in this HP tablet. A co-worker of mine who is a webos fan recently migrated over to Android, mainly because of poor app selection on webos. That doesn’t give me much hope for a tablet version, but I guess we’ll see.
On the other hand, if you use a lot of paid apps, that’s not the most economical choice. If you have an iPhone, you can use all the apps you’ve already paid for on your iPad. If you get an Android or WebOS tablet, you’ll have to buy your apps again, unless the app maker arranges for a “competitive upgrade” or something like that.
The whole platform specific appstore model is just plain wrong. I can’t see myself buying into it.
Edited 2011-06-11 10:10 UTC
It *does* look like a nice product (but then so did the Playbook) and it does have a slick looking UI… but then iOS 5 exists, and negates everything else for me.
There is no SkyPE or Live!Messenger or Yahoo!Messenger for these, so no use for me
No Skype, but Live Messenger and Yahoo are available via third-party Synergy plug-ins. And they integrate seamlessly with the messaging app.
There’s also IM+, supporting quite a few protocols out of the box, which I used on WebOS 1.4.5. No Skype though, as 3rd party apps have been systematically killed through the last year.
Looks really cool. Hopefully HP will open up the webOS to manufacturers so HTC can make a webOS phone.
I’d like to play with it, but I don’t know anyone who owns one.
So that at least someone has said it.
Well, in HPs defense, Apple didn’t start releasing to other countries overnight. In-fact I seem to remember the iPad being released in very few countries then getting sold in more countries as Apple secured their distribution channels. Starting slow is exactly what HP needs to do.
Today’s announcement showcased what HP was ready to talk about today — it doesn’t rule out other announcements (about features, partners, geographies) in the future.
Also, ramasubbu_sk: released webOS devices do support Yahoo messenger already, and have for quite a while.
I think what got to Thom is, HP had this big announcement monts ago about what product they would release and how we all had to wait 4 months before they would release a product.
And then it turns out they didn’t release it for his country, any time soon.
It would be better if they would have been clear about it from the start.
I have been waiting for this to finally be announced by HP/Palm since February 9th that I was almost about to jump ship. Yes the App Catalog in webOS is not all that great however, I rarely use more than one or two apps at a time. I came from using an Android base phone and the way you manage apps is so crappy that I left Android for webOS. I am a huge podcast listener and the podcast client Google built for Android just sucks. The one the homebrew community release called drPodder makes me a happy webOS user. Yes, I know Apple’s iOS is the multimedia king. However, Apple’s iOS UI needs an update in my crazy opinion. Recently Apple talked about location base reminders at the WWDC event, you have been able to do that in webOS since the beginning with an app called GeoStrings. Notifications is better in webOS than the annoying pop ups of iOS.
Also, HP and Palm have been really good to the homebrew community and all with giving them a $10k server. The ease of using an overclocked kernel is easier in webOS than Android(do not have to root the device). You can almost not brick one of these phones. The community of webOS fans is great. The developers are easy to get a hold of on Twitter and will try to work with you on trying to fix the problems you have. Some of the webOS fans are really dedicated to the OS, there are some people out there still using two year Palm Pre’s that are falling apart.
Notice that notifications have recently improved in iOS 5 to reach the quality standards of other modern mobile OSs, though I think they’ve kept this silly “application grid” home screen, making in the end the lock screen paradoxically display more meaningful information.
Edited 2011-06-10 07:37 UTC
In the third paragraph I think you’re looking for ‘entrench’, as in dig in for defense, rather than ‘entrance’, as in distribute the drugs more widely…
About the TouchPad, I’m going to be cheering it on…but only from the sidelines. As an ex-PalmPilot programmer I saw wave after wave of half-hearted efforts to revitalise the PalmPilot space. Different CPUs, different APIs, different OSes, pathetic developer support, fumbled marketing efforts, and frankly *crap* app store efforts.
That’s not to say there weren’t stars out there: people who were trying their utmost to make it happen. The problem was that they were mostly at the lower levels of the organisation. You didn’t have one over-controlling, paranoid, self-centered, egomaniacal guy saying “it’s going to be like *this*”.
Much as I don’t care for Jobs and the choices he’s made for the iPads, (no flash? You gotta be kidding me, just throw the dummy out the pram already), he’s made the most compelling platform, tied up with the most compelling content.
This is the key thing, as without content, it’s just a shiny paperweight. Don’t believe me? Try one of those horrible cheap Chinese Android tablets that can’t access the app market. They’re just paperweights, without the shiny bit. (Google, what were you thinking? You have two whole generations of tablet impressions out there that android tablets are rubbish. Even if slow, those Chinese tablets would have been interesting if they could only have hit the app market.)
With the littered path of broken Palm promises, HP’s going to have a long row to hoe to win back developer (content creator?) trust.
The fact that people are willing to lumber themselves with the abomination that is iTunes just to make the iOS platform work says an awful lot about the quality of the iOS platform.
For my money, I’ll be buying the next-gen iPad, I reckon…all the while cheering for HP. Go team!
Instead of bitching you could have asked one of your fellow German readers to get one for you, but alas