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Did HP just kill the tablet market with their WebOS?

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Ns1 said:
in a few months nobody will even remember the touchpad.
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And ultimately, who cares. You are completely missing the point. It's a very cheap entry point for a half decent touchpad. You can use it as a portable movie/audio player. You can use it as an e-reader. You can download some apps and do a lot with it. There's also the possibility of installing Android on it and then you're open to a huge repository of apps.

Just being an easy to use web browser around the house for quick things where I don't want to break out a laptop/pc, but also want something larger than a phone screen. For $99, you can't go wrong.
 
ugh, it doesn't seem like they're cutting the price in europe...

had they cut the price I'd have bought it, I could really use a good tablet instead of all my text books...
 
There are Dev's working on the port of android 3.x.x already and HP announced they will refund you the difference if you bought a touchpad FROM DAY 1 or later. THAT is incredible, so early adopters need only to call up HP and can get a credit.
 
It's calculated HP has burned through ~300,000 of these things this weekend.

As far as it killing other tablet sales, yeah, for right now, but honestly $99 is impulse buy territory, and a lot of folks will be disappointed in them, the reviews aren't good. Look for them to show up used for $75 soon, most won't port Android to them, most won't tweak them to make them a bit faster. They may well decide they want a better tablet come Christmas time 😀
 
Pliablemoose said:
It's calculated HP has burned through ~300,000 of these things this weekend.

As far as it killing other tablet sales, yeah, for right now, but honestly $99 is impulse buy territory, and a lot of folks will be disappointed in them, the reviews aren't good. Look for them to show up used for $75 soon, most won't port Android to them, most won't tweak them to make them a bit faster. They may well decide they want a better tablet come Christmas time 😀
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i figured if i can get a couple for 99 each, itll be worth it for a web browser, maybe reader kind of thing, or for the kids to fiddle with

if someone can get anrdoid on them working as well as you can get it on a nook color then itll be pretty damn sweet, but i expect thats a big "if" right now *shrug*
 
OutHouse said:
why would you even waste your time with a obsolete item?
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Technical specs are competitive, 1.2Ghz Snapdragon, 9.7" IPS, etc. If it gets rooted and Android loaded, then this is a spectacular deal for a tablet. WebOS is dead imho, but Android is basically the de-facto king of phones/tablets, sorry Apple, but the numbers are looking like 3-1 ratio or higher within a couple of years. Not that Apple is in trouble or anything, but Android is gonna keep swallowing marketshare.

If for some reason nobody is able to fully crack it and get android on there, well, it's a $99 portable media player / web browser at worst.
 
Using mine as a giant touch screen basic calculator. Anything else that it can do is icing on the cake as far as I'm concerned.
 
Phokus said:
Doesn't seem very energy efficient to do that.
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Maybe not a standard photo frame, but a photo album perhaps? Obviously not the norm with other families, but we have relatives over several times a year that like to flip through old photo albums. We actually just had a birthday last month for a 1 year old and were passing around a 1st gen iPad with about a thousand baby pictures 😀
 
Arkaign said:
If for some reason nobody is able to fully crack it and get android on there, well, it's a $99 portable media player / web browser at worst.
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Heh, that's all I wanted mine for to begin with. How many of these did HP get to market in total? I'd imagine if enough of these get in the wild we'll see quite a few decent apps and a potentially interesting ecosystem.
 
I find the core notion behind this thread just bizarre - Apple and Google are supposed to be afraid of losing market share because HP has dumped a bunch of unsalable tablets at a loss? Yeah, good luck with that . . .
 
sjwaste said:
If you want something for the car, I'd strongly suggest getting a 7" Android tablet. Something with a Cyanogen Mod port to it. You can customize the hell out of it for a car interface, but it will likely have your core functionality working - Wifi, BT, audio out, GPS, etc. Something with an FM tuner could really be built around as a car media center, especially if you have a Double DIN dash opening and want to get creative.
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I was considering something like that for a carputer (to replace my factory one), but the one negative point that I considered is that the tablets are too slow to boot. My car's built-in system loads up in ~5 seconds, but my iPad 2 takes about 20-30 seconds. You could probably argue that the initial car boot time is a little negligible, but I'd prefer to get within 5-10 seconds boot time.

One thing I considered was buying a TI OMAP4340 dev board and modifying Android to be more efficient by removing all of the stuff that I don't need or possibly considering a "load on demand" structure. Although, I could probably do this with one of those 7" tablets as well!
 
Don Vito Corleone said:
I find the core notion behind this thread just bizarre - Apple and Google are supposed to be afraid of losing market share because HP has dumped a bunch of unsalable tablets at a loss? Yeah, good luck with that . . .
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Agreed. This is nothing but a blip on the radar for Apple/Android. Sure, it'll eat into a small percentage of sales for the next week or two, but then it'll be business as usual.

What this does show is that other tablets are far overpriced and the huge market for a low priced tablet is obviously there. I'd imagine if Apple released something in the $175-$199 range it would sell out big time.
 
Phokus said:
Doesn't seem very energy efficient to do that.
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As long as the CPU/GPU receive proper power gating, I don't see how it'd be much worse than your standard digital photo frame. The biggest power draw in such devices is typically the screen anyway.
 
i love webos's multitasking. it's the best out there. android's fucking sucks.

you can actually easily close the program with webos... with android, it's a pain in the ass and burns your battery. it still runs in the background.
 
LikeLinus said:
Agreed. This is nothing but a blip on the radar for Apple/Android. Sure, it'll eat into a small percentage of sales for the next week or two, but then it'll be business as usual.

What this does show is that other tablets are far overpriced and the huge market for a low priced tablet is obviously there. I'd imagine if Apple released something in the $175-$199 range it would sell out big time.
Click to expand...

What this really shows is that there's a huge market for current technology going for 1/3 the manufacturing cost. Apple would never built a tablet for $199 at this point in time because the corners they'd have to cut to reach that price range (same price range as a Kindle 3G) would result in a very crappy product.
 
Dangerer said:
What this really shows is that there's a huge market for current technology going for 1/3 the manufacturing cost. Apple would never built a tablet for $199 at this point in time because the corners they'd have to cut to reach that price range (same price range as a Kindle 3G) would result in a very crappy product.
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I thought the iPad had a much lower build cost than other manufacturers... mostly because of the great supplier contracts that Apple has in place. With that, they may be able to build a smaller tablet that's far cheaper (say $250-300).
 
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