A Good Tablet and Several Phones to Disappear

Three months ago, I mentioned the mixed reactions I had encountered to Hewlett-Packard’s purchase of Palm and WebOS last year for $1.2 billion. After the buyout, HP released the Veer and, more recently, the TouchPad. The latter is a tablet device, which initial reviews suggested might have given the iPad serious competition.

But to the surprise of many industry experts as well as HP stockholders, HP has announced that it will discontinue operations for all of its WebOS devices, including the TouchPad tablets and smartphones. The company seems to have buckled under the pressure of Apple's market dominance (?)and the growing popular acceptance of Android.

HP also said that it is exploring the possible spin-off or sale of its Personal Systems Group (PSG), their personal computer division. This all comes as quite a surprise, as HP is currently the world's largest PC vendor. It is possible that another company will purchase the Palm and WebOS holdings from HP.  At least one developer for WebOS lauded the technology and expressed hope that WebOS could be revived somehow, and some predict that developers will find a way to continue playing with WebOS on a variety of devices. It is possible that WebOS will be licensed by HP for use on other systems. HP has said in a statement that it will continue to explore options to optimize the value of WebOS software going forward.

WebOS devices offered an interface felt to rival Apple's and had one of the best multitasking systems. Developers found software development for the devices very easy because it was all based on HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. These are all standards widely used on the World Wide Web.

One interesting result of the announcement is that HP sold off their stock of TouchPads for $100 for the 16Gbyte version and $150 for the 32Gbyte version. Ironically, they have completely sold out,making the TouchPad becoming the hottest selling mobile device for a brief period. But unfortunately for new owners, new applications and upgrades certainly won’t become available for the foreseeable future, if they do at all.

It will be interesting to see if we will see similar occurrences among other vendors. I remain concerned that Research in Motion, makers of Blackberry devices may also have problems. Right now, RIM is doing reasonably well because of their secure network capability between their devices and their servers, but Apple and Android developers are going after this part of the market and may eventually erase this advantage. At that point, Blackberry devices (which I and others find less user-friendly than their competition) will be at great risk. Stay tuned.