The HP Palm Liveblog Liveblog!
February 9th, 2011, 11:53am by JakeToday’s the day! The TouchPad is just hours away from being announced, per PreCentral & Engadget. Stay tuned & post your snarky one-liners here.
Today’s the day! The TouchPad is just hours away from being announced, per PreCentral & Engadget. Stay tuned & post your snarky one-liners here.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 at 11:53 am by Jake and is filed under Portable Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 9th, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Pre3 not available until summer?! Dammit. At least there’ll be an EVDO/world option. I have doubts that I’ll be patient enough.
February 9th, 2011 at 1:42 pm
Dammit, what happened to not making annoucements for stuff they don’t have, and for things being available in weeks? “Early Spring” and Summer are not “weeks” away.
February 9th, 2011 at 2:22 pm
Even the TouchPad won’t be out ’til summer. That Apotheker guy’s quote was totally misleading. “Weeks” my ass.
February 9th, 2011 at 2:23 pm
…and it sounds like the Pre3’s CPU isn’t dual-core, “just” a 1.4 GHZ, mostly Core A8-based CPU. *sigh*
February 9th, 2011 at 4:56 pm
So the long and short version of the products announced is: Veer (mini-Pre2), Pre3 (maxi-Pre2), and an iPad2 knockoff, to be released in Spring, Summer, and Summer, respectively. No real complaints about the devices themselves, but the timing is pretty disappointing. And no prices announced. Pretty underwhelming, overall.
They got Kindle, though, at least for the tablet. Oh, and the Pre2 will be available tomorrow for preorder. Hopefully the iPhone sells out really quick so customers will be forced to settle for a Pre2. Haha.
February 9th, 2011 at 5:52 pm
Also saw this bit of disturbing news, that webOS won’t be coming to any legacy devices. That’s really a stomach punch, as webOS is still missing pieces that should’ve shipped on the original Pre such as voice command.
http://www.precentral.net/no-major-webos-ota-updates-pre-pre-plus-pixi-pixi-plus
February 9th, 2011 at 6:10 pm
Whoops.
“HP will stop making announcements for stuff it doesn’t have. When HP makes announcements, it will be getting ready to ship,” (HP’s CEO) promises, saying the products launched on 9 February will be on sale just a few weeks later.
February 9th, 2011 at 6:12 pm
Besides all the sour grapes, the devices look great, first impressions are uniformly gushing, and looking forward to my webOS printers & netbooks. But the Pre3 really needs to be 4G, otherwise early adopters are largely going to shun the device.
February 9th, 2011 at 6:14 pm
No webOS 2.0 on our Pre’s after months of promises just makes HP look like complete amateurs. BTW, the hits keep coming… no gesture area(s) on the tablet according to precentral! It will be interesting to see how they duplicate the back command without it; I’d hope for a gesture that can be performed anywhere on the screen. Maybe a 3 finger left swipe, like Macbooks have?
February 9th, 2011 at 9:08 pm
Confirmation that Palm is kicking its most loyal users to the curb. Ouch. The Pre Plus was being sold TODAY at HP Wireless. Promises to do “something special” when the Veer & Pre3 are released, but that’s just the latest in a long string of hollow promises. Geeze, Palm hit it out of the park, then pulled the rug out from under us with the 6-month launch wait and the failure to ever deliver features that were strongly hinted at when the original Pre launched. Ugh. webOS 2.0 should’ve been out 6 months ago.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/09/original-pre-pre-plus-pixi-and-pixi-plus-wont-get-updated-to/
——————
We’re hoping he wasn’t speaking out of turn here, but for what it’s worth, Palm developer advocate Josh Marinacci has said on stage at webOS Developer Days today in New York that webOS 2.0 will be coming to “all” Palm devices in “the coming months.”
February 10th, 2011 at 5:58 am
So, what’s the verdict? You guys don’t sound terribly optimistic — sounds like the hardware is nice, but in typical Palm fashion, they’re finding innovative ways to drop the ball (like no webOS 2.0 on older devices). And the old chestnut, “It’s gonna be AWESOME… in six months.”
So, as your phones are getting older, are you sticking with HP, or was this the final straw?
February 10th, 2011 at 12:12 pm
I’m like a rudderless ship– no idea what I’m going to do. I guess I’ll just buy what jake gets. He got me in this mess when I copied him to get the Pre in the first place :).
I don’t want to get stuck with a 3G phone– it’s fine now, but it will seem pathetic in a year. Unfortunately, that eliminates all but Android phones at the moment. Would like to wait for options from WP7, iOS, webOS, but I may need a phone sooner rather than later. A seriously, a webOS 4G phone has got to be more than a year away. As for tablets, I guess I can wait. Not terribly impressed by the HP Trackpad or whatever they call it, but maybe we’ll see how that develops. Don’t need a tablet at all, so no reason to be hasty.
February 10th, 2011 at 1:38 pm
The verdict is the products look great today, but given Palm’s track record (Flash in early 2010, webOS 2.0 by the end of the year, Pre launching in first half of 2009), I think the realistic expectation is that we can’t buy a Pre3 until mid-late August, 6 months from now. Those killer specs won’t be so killer by then. Not sure it’s worth waiting for.
Not ready to jump ship just yet, but if there’s a better device with a better value proposition, I’m past the point of waiting for Palm to deliver. At some point, the continued series of late shipments, broken promises and under performance has to be accepted as the norm, not the exception. Could wait 6 months for the Pre3, only to find that HP has decided that, no, they don’t really want to be in the Smartphone business.
The stupidity of Palm is that all they have to do is ship something called webOS 2.0 with exhibition and a microphone API and 99% of the voluminous complaints disappear. It’s obvious now that along with kicking the Palm brand to the curb, HP has also decided to dump on their die-hard loyalists. And this is coming from the guy that would’ve bought a 7″ and 10″ tablet if they were each released yesterday.
The official send off from HP follows:
————————————————-
Your device is not able to support the new features of webOS 2.
Therefore, your device will not receive a webOS 2 update. The latest software version for your device is webOS 1.4.5.
We are working on alternative plans with Sprint and will be sharing details in the coming weeks. Please come back to palm.com/webos-info to find out more
Your current device:
Palm Pre on Sprint.
February 10th, 2011 at 2:06 pm
To be honest, I don’t really want webOS 2.0, from what I can tell. Rubinstein told Engadget that legacy devices won’t run webOS 2.0 adequately due to performance issues, and 1.4.5 is a bloated enough pig as it is. The best thing about 2.0 was that it was supposed to be faster (at least the database caching), not slower. Flash would have been a fun novelty, but otherwise, I con’t think we’re missing anything significant.
OTOH, I’m kind of skeptical that the hardware is to blame. That should have been obvious right away, and even 2 months ago, that wasn’t the official story. Maybe carriers weren’t interested in testing/qualifying it. They’d prefer you buy a Pre2 :).
February 10th, 2011 at 5:56 pm
Boy, the more I read about the fallout from the event, the more it’s starting to feel like a complete train wreck. This is the reality distortion field wearing off. Now it’s coming out that the TouchPad only runs the newly released Enyo framework natively, and that current webOS apps (“mojo” apps) will only run in emulation. Yes that’s right, the Touchpad currently has an native app count of 0, just like the Blackberry Playbook. Now it makes sense why HP needed to announce the Touchpad months in advance. So the fragmentation picture is this:
Pre/Pixi on 1.4.5: Mojo only
Pre2/Pre3/Veer on 2.1: Mojo & Enyo (but with gesture area)
Touchpad on 3.0: Enyo only (but with no gesture area)
I feel bad for our developer buddy Shane, who will have to start from scratch if he wants to port Flickr Mundo to the Tablet or presumably, to any future devices. All he got for his trouble is about 400 copies sold and a lesson learned.
February 11th, 2011 at 12:42 am
Really, as polished as the presentation seemed, HP/Palm just wasn’t ready for prime time. I don’t know if waiting 2 months would’ve solved anything, but here are two giant issues that HP just failed to anticipate. HP still hasn’t given a clear answer on what Mojo apps run like on the TouchPad– is it akin to running Classic on webOS, with but instead of a simulated graffiti area taking part of the screen there’s a simulated gesture area instead? That might be OK, presuming that the scaling is done well, it might be completely transparent. On the other hand, are we talking about Mojo apps running in a tiny window on the TouchPad, which effectively makes them useless? And combined with the lack of 2.0 on any carrier device in the US, there won’t be any Enyo apps being used. And I can’t see any developers writing new Mojo stuff. Will HP hit the rest button again in another 2 years? It’s all so odd, so the ease of development was supposedly the strength of the platform, and now they’re deprecating the frameworks entirely.
And back to 2.0 fiasco, how could HP have failed to anticipate this reaction? An “oh by the way” after the big presser was about the dumbest timing possible. Why not a month ago? The continued clumsy response and lack of in-house communication on the issue gives the impression that Palm was racing to finish the script within hours of the briefing. Throw in the CEO’s remark about “weeks, not months” and it looks ever more like amateur hour. All that smack talk was great if they had backed it up with products shipping before August.
What a mess. Only good that might come of it is new Pres may start showing up for $50, which would save me the trouble of a day arguing with Sprint Inc. to replace my phone for the 4th time.
February 11th, 2011 at 11:21 pm
The bad publicity continues…
webOS developer pulls a 2.0- only app because Palm isn’t smart enough to not present itto 1.4.5 users. Pathetic.
February 12th, 2011 at 2:28 am
This joke got old long ago, but this is a particular good Downfall take.
February 13th, 2011 at 12:17 pm
Here’s a quote from one developer in the comments at http://funkatron.com/site/comments/thoughts-on-the-hp-think-beyond-webos-event/
OK, I’m going to break my NDA, a secret promise, since Palm broke their highly-advertised promise.
I was on the webOS 2.1 beta on current devices, and things were coming along fine. There were a few bugs, as is normal for software development and they were being hammered out, but MY Pre plus was operating as a whole much more smoothly than it is now on 1.4.5. Suddenly and without warning, late last month the beta was pulled and we were told to doctor back to 1.4.5 and trash our old builds—never to speak of this again.
February 13th, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Ed spoke to an Adobe employee at the developer event– he was part of the team that had been working on porting Flash for over 2 years. He told Ed that midway through 2010, they gave up on running Flash at 500 MHz (which is what the Pre-Pre2’s all run at). Maybe once HP/Palm made Flash one of the more highly-touted feature of 2.0, there was no way to put 2.0 on legacy hardware. Disappointing as it is to most users, in my particular case, it would have been too late anyway. My Pre is simply falling apart.
February 13th, 2011 at 5:21 pm
My Pre is really in great shape apart from the headphone jack.
*tries cleaning headphone jack one more time*
Nope, it’s hopeless. Cheapest “like new” Pres seem to be around $100. Like this one local to you, http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/mob/2212677312.html . Holding out until I can find one in “good” condition for $50.