Insight into HP Discontinuing Touchpad / webOS
Some of the information below comes from friends who work in the webOS Global Business Unit, née Palm.
When HP announced that they were ceasing production of webOS devices last Thursday, it all seemed rather curt and abrupt: their $1.2 billion Palm acquisition, dismissed with a couple of sentences in a press release? I hear it wasn't how they wanted to handle the situation — rumor has it they weren't even going to announce this for several more weeks, if not months — but their hand was forced when someone leaked the news to Bloomberg. Just about everyone in the company was caught completely off-guard, including higher-ups at the webOS Global Business Unit who were left in the dark
Jon Rubinstein didn't think the product was ready to ship, but HP didn't want to wait any longer to release it.
webOS 3.0, the software version that ships on the TouchPad, was being developed literally until the day the tablet was launched. Engineers knew that the software was rough, and fragmentation was already starting to occur. webOS 3.0 isn't simply the same old webOS scaled up: HP essentially forked out a new version of the OS and engineered it specifically for the tablet form factor, with an entirely new software development framework (Enyo).
This meant that the Pre 2 and Pre 3 were stuck on webOS 2.1 indefinitely, and wouldn't be seeing the benefits
Speaking of the Pre 3, what exactly happened there? It was announced way back in February, but to this day it has yet to surface in the United States (and now it probably never will).
Ever felt like Palm's phones looked slightly dated?
By the time new devices were ready for production, some of their designs were almost half a year old or more.
Carriers started to doubt their efforts, and by the time the Pre 3 was announced, Sprint had given up on them entirely.
After the Pre 3, there were no more slider phones in the works; HP planned to supersede the Pre lineup with new slab phones.
The first unreleased phone, codenamed "Windsor", was targeted for release late last year but was cancelled by higher-ups within the company.
The second unreleased phone, codenamed "Stingray", was slated for release at the beginning of this summer. It was a thin slab phone with a large glass high-resolution touchscreen, front-facing camera, rear 8MP camera, and no physical keyboard. Employees were excited about this phone as it would answer the cries for a more EVO-like webOS device.
but too many software deadlines were missed towards the end, when engineers were pre-occupied with readying the TouchPad. By that point, the carriers decided they didn't want it anymore and the product was cancelled.
A smaller 7-inch tablet codenamed "Opal" was already in the hands of the QA team for debugging, slated for release later this year
And last but not least, the Foleo was ready for a comeback: HP had webOS running on a netbook form factor internally by late Spring, with a new build of the software codenamed "Dartfish".
I don't feel bad for the HP executives, who lacked the ambition to properly execute; but I do feel bad for the Palm employees who worked incredibly hard in hopes of seeing webOS succeed.
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1bpzx
jacobvanloon
prguitarman
gummygunk
areudirty
yousharknotpass
dailybridgerton
