HP to Contribute webOS to Open Source

Source: HP WebOS Developer Blog
HP to enable creativity of the community to accelerate the next-generation web-centric platform
PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec. 9, 2011 – HP today announced it will contribute the webOS software to the open source community.

HP plans to continue to be active in the development and support of webOS. By combining the innovative webOS platform with the development power of the open source community, there is the opportunity to significantly improve applications and web services for the next generation of devices.

webOS offers a number of benefits to the entire ecosystem of web applications. For developers, applications can be easily built using standard web technologies. In addition, its single integrated stack offers multiplatform portability. For device manufacturers, it provides a single web-centric platform to run across multiple devices. As a result, the end user benefits from a fast, immersive user experience.

“webOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices.”

HP will make the underlying code of webOS available under an open source license. Developers, partners, HP engineers and other hardware manufacturers can deliver ongoing enhancements and new versions into the marketplace.

HP will engage the open source community to help define the charter of the open source project under a set of operating principles:

- The goal of the project is to accelerate the open development of the
webOS platform
- HP will be an active participant and investor in the project
- Good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation
- Software will be provided as a pure open source project

HP also will contribute ENYO, the application framework for webOS, to the community in the near future along with a plan for the remaining components of the user space.

Beginning today, developers and customers are invited to provide input and suggestions at http://developer.palm.com/blog/.

Source: HP WebOS Developer Blog

©2012 Technology Blogged, News. All Rights Reserved.

If you are an employee of a technology giant then missing out on one of their firesale’s calls for drastic action, and HP knows this. In a bid possibly to keep loyalty amongst its integral operations, HP has brought the TouchPad back from the dead for employees who missed out on the initial fire sale, and it will be available from the 28th of September for the usual price of $99 for the 16GB model and $149 for the 32GB one. To keep numbers consistent for employees across the board there will be a maximum number of one TouchPad per HP employee.

There are no hints yet as to a similar deal with the Pre 3, however something tells us it’s more than likely to go down sometime soon. Now, HP’s TouchPad may be a discontinued product officially, but we think WebOS will be on devices sometime next year. If interested, read how HP failed with WebOS.

Via: Techcrunch

©2012 Technology Blogged, News. All Rights Reserved.

HP’s decision to halt the production of WebOS devices came to a rather large shock to me. As an avid user of consumer technology, WebOS came at a time when iOS and Android were making all the headlines and it revived the Palm brand for a brief moment in time and raked in a fair bit of cash. During my time with WebOS I have had some great moments of usage and have watched as three generations of Pre smartphones come out and one generation of tablet. It seems to me that despite my own love for this truly spectacular operating system (yet admittedly love or hate hardware) something went terribly wrong over at HP after they bought Palm out, and when you take a step back to think about what Palm offered with the Pre, Pre 2 and what HP offered with the Pre 3 and TouchPad, it all seems a little bit strange that such great products can’t have a high demand even if there are competitors out there shoving their products in your face, a la Apple.

It’s all in the marketing, baby

Marketing plays a massive role in the products we as consumers buy and for anybody not clued in to the tech world advertisements are the first point of contact. This is one of the reasons WebOS devices have failed to sell well just as they should have, due to HP not pushing the products they had enough for sales.

I’m not blaming Palm here. I’m blaming HP.

All the way back in 2009 when Palm first released the Pre the media it received was more than huge, it was gigantic. In a number of ways, Palm was coming back from a break in the smartphone market and they were promising an operating system which was a delight to use. Through reviews and hands on usage, this was confirmed to be true and here in the UK in particular it stood out vastly amongst other handsets with thanks to awesome hardware. Even the most valuable brand in the world Apple admitted that the WebOS software was a step in the right direction for Palm and that the way it multitasks was an example of multitasking which works.

If you take a note from my above sentence that I’m blaming HP for the lack of demand of WebOS devices you’d be right on 95% of accounts, but Palm also failed in a couple of key areas here. First of all, Palm released the Pre after the Motorola Droid which ironically was Motorola’s very own Pre in that it was the only chance for them to get back in to market after RAZR. This was a huge mistake on Palm’s behalf, because Google’s Android operating system had already made itself a brand identity in the smartphone market and a real world choice over Apple devices. What’s more, Motorola’s Droid / Milestone already had a clear gap in the market it could slide in to (QWERTY totting keyboard, no pun intended) whilst the Pre, although having a hardware keyboard, couldn’t compete with the pricing or customizability the Droid offered consumers. Immediately, then, a lot of people called it game set and match including Job Rubenstein Palm’s CEO at the time, who is quoted as saying in March 2010:

“If we could have launched at Verizon prior to the Droid, I think we would have gotten the attention the Droid got. And since I believe we have a better product, I think we could have even done better”

During Jon Rubenstein stating the above, 8 months after the Palm Pre release, Palm recorded a net loss of $22 million in the third quarter compared to a mammoth $98 million in losses the year before that. Despite Palm’s losses, then, things were slowly starting to get better year on year for Palm in terms of revenue however only 408,000 smartphones were sold to average Joe consumers whilst a whole 960,000 were sold on to businesses during that third quarter. Palm announced that they were disappointed in this, despite WebOS landing them $49.9 million in revenues above what they predicted for that quarter*. It would seem at that time then unless Palm did something quick to try and sell their products to consumers and not businesses they’d continue to ship out a low number of handsets, despite the fairly high margins they were selling them to businesses at.

Then HP bought Palm

On April the 28^th of 2010 news broke that HP were in talks with Palm to buy out the company, and on the 31^st of July 2010 this deal became a reality. To the tune of $1.2 billion Palm was no longer a competitor in the smartphone market, and HP had a whole lotta’ media bigging them up with talks surrounding a huge re-launch for WebOS devices and also talks of a tablet. This tablet would later prove to be one of the last WebOS device’s launched by HP.

HP (Hewlett Packard) is an American based company specializing in information technology, but you’ll know them best from the amount of laptops, computers and printers they sell. Their acquisition of Palm for $1.2 billion drew excitement from media analysts and me for a few reasons; firstly HP didn’t have much of an identity in the mobile sphere so how they were going to play this was of interest, and secondly HP’s success has come from IT services and inkjet printers, the second point of which they are no.2 in the world. Could the computer and printer marketing boffins over at HP really cut it in the mobile world?

Apparently not. In the UK (where I live, and am writing this article from) I recall seeing two HP TouchPad television adverts, however no Pre 3 adverts. In fact, the only mass marketing I ever saw was from Palm themselves, who upon release of the original Pre got TV advertising slots at peak time. This is one of the reasons for me that HP failed to get their products to consumers, and I also think in a way they thought they could just release new products on the basis that Palm had done enough to get their products noticed.

Let’s not second guess though that me seeing no HP advertisements equals the rest of the word not, as I’m confident that isn’t the case. I’m just stating that for me if I was an average consumer, one HP TouchPad advert a month and 20 iPad adverts equals my money going to Apple. Such a shame.

WebOS’s cut off was planned, months ahead

Palm released their original Pre amidst the launch of Motorola’s Droid / Milestone smartphone to go back to points raised above, and this resulted in a slow growth for Palm’s very first handset. Jon Rubenstein admitted this however, so let’s move over to after HP took over and subsequently released the Pre 3 and TouchPad.

The Pre 3 was launched alongside some seriously competitive handsets on the 17^th of August this year commercially in the UK, such as the HTC Sensation, Galaxy S II, iPhone 4 and newer technologies such as the LG Optimus 3D. Competition is essential in business, but HP failed in every single way to make their handset stand out and I don’t think they even bothered with it. I mean, HP’s decision to end the life of WebOS must have been planned months in advance of the Pre 3 release so was the Pre 3 just a send off and goodbye for the Pre line and what’s more, was the TouchPad just HP’s way of pleasing the customers it had by releasing something they had wanted for so long? In many ways this was the case. You get the sense with the TouchPad in particular that HP looked at an iPad, built their case around the same thickness, looked at what processors tablets had and followed their lines, realised most tablets don’t ship with server streaming capabilities so didn’t bother, and then thought that users wouldn’t be bothered about connecting to say a Wifi network printer. All of these things really knack consumers off, but on the basis that the TouchPad was just a goodbye and thank you for buying the products, it only appears fitting that HP appear to have cut corners with this product.

That isn’t to say the TouchPad is a bad product though because I own the 32GB version and use it daily. The software on the device is a wonder to behold and I love the multitasking cards WebOS utilizes.

Let’s sum up

HP failed in a number of key areas with WebOS. First of all HP failed to create hardware which kept up with competitors aesthetically (average consumers see design first, specs later). Second of all HP failed to market their products as unique, direct alternatives to the Android and iPad competition. Thirdly HP didn’t exactly entice developers so much as to want to code apps for the WebOS market, and last but not least HP made a huge mistake thinking that they could compete with their brand, which up until now had absolutely no relevance in the smartphone market.

Ultimately HP failed though because they decided to let the Palm name die away over a year ago, a mistake in its own right due to brand awareness and prior products carrying the name Palm ‘product’.

What does everybody else think about HP’s mistakes? comments are open.

Sources: PC Pro (Rubenstein quote), Wikipedia (Pre release date)

©2012 Technology Blogged, News. All Rights Reserved.

You’re sitting there in your abode, casually stabbing your finger into the screen of your tablet of choice. But what’s this? Sure, it might act like multitasking but where are the cards, man? The answer to that question, alongside all your other tablet woes lies within its 9.45 x 7.48 x 0.54 inch frame. All this is good news for those living in the UK because it’s going to be hitting most major retailers on the 15th of July for the not-that-cheap cost of £399 for the 16GB WiFi-only model or £479 for the 32GB toting model.

So if you’re ready to get your hands wrapped around some sexy big screened WebOS, your time has come. May all the dual core 1.2GHz, 9.7 inch screens and dual speaker action in the world be yours.

©2012 Technology Blogged, News. All Rights Reserved.

It’s fairly common that companies try to kick up a media frenzy when they launch a new device however HP’s Eric Cador has taken the cake for this month after bigging up their next-gen tablet – the TouchPad 2- in an announcement made not long ago at a press conference in Cannes. Eric Cador on the subject of HP’s future in the tablet market said;

“In the PC world, with fewer ways of differentiating HP’s products from our competitors, we became number one; in the tablet world we’re going to become better than number one. We call it number one plus.”

So, HP have some pretty big ambitions for the future ahead in the tablet market. It is fair to say that their first tablet the TouchPad is an amazingly capable device, and how they could improve on it (apparently so drastically) is a mystey. Personally i’m just looking forward to the future, and expect to see some serious marketing in the near future from HP.

©2012 Technology Blogged, News. All Rights Reserved.

Everbody who has the faintest idea of what has been going on within the world of technology knows that Apple is one of the fastest growing companies in the world. This can be summed up by its products which have consistently sold by the tens of millions.

One analyst however in the name of Forrester Research’s founder and CEO George Colony has stated that Apple’s growth is to exceed anybodys imagination within two years, and that the Cupertino company’s growth could “allow it to become bigger than IT giants IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

On top of George colony stating the facts, Colony also said of Apple that “They’ll be bigger than IBM next year, and they’ll be bigger than HP the year after that. They’re going to be a $200 billion revenue company”

©2012 Technology Blogged, News. All Rights Reserved.

Older Palm hardware will not see a webos 2.0 update

Oh HP what have you done. After an absolutely storming event last night where you unveiled the new rather sexual Palm Pre, you had a little chat with Engadget and informed them that older Palm devices such as the the original Pre, the Pre Plus, the Pixi, and the Pixi Plus won’t be receiving a webOS 2.0 update, even though you promised it earlier in the year.

Chatting to engadget, Jon Rubenstein did however say that HP were to do  ”something special” for owners of older hardware when the Pre 3, the Veer, and the beautiful looking TouchPad hit the consumer market.

We’ll have to wait and see what that ‘something special’ is, though.

©2012 Technology Blogged, News. All Rights Reserved.

HP has recently added a training video to it’s website which spills the beans on the fact that they are in the foreseable future going to release webOS based internet tablets PC’s. The training video talks about great synergies that can result from smartphones, slates and netbooks all running the same OS (a la Android); which means cross platform consumer electronics for the masses in webOS style.

webOS was originally a Palm smartphone OS which made its way onto the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi before HP bought Palm. Since then, there has been rumour and speculation surrounding what webOS will be used on next.

©2012 Technology Blogged, News. All Rights Reserved.