*thorough HP never fully committed to fixing the OS and marketing that was already struggling in the hands of Palm so it is not really a surprise what happened.
I picked up an open box 16gb at futureshop in ontario for $89.99 and am using it right now. Try to snag one for $100 or $150 too. I don't really get it, why didn't they drop to $200, why go so low?
are you complaining they made it too low? The only problem I see with them being 100.00 is they are flying off the shelf before I can get there. This may the the slowest pad out there but for 100.00 or less I bite!
because they burned the product which had already been failing, now who wants to buy that kind of discontinued failure for a small discount, you have to rip the bandaid off fast. it does them no good to drag it out, these things lose value by the day, and they need some money back asap, salvage what is left and be done with it. time is money, no time should be spent on a dead product line.
Not true, go look at ebay. People are buying them for alot more than $100. Given how fast they are selling at $100, HP could have priced them more, easy.
Conclusion: That software guy is an idiot. Canning their pc division is a very risky move, considering it makes up about half their revenues. If this new direction fails, they are in deep shit. And enterprises usually wants to buy a package; how are they going to offer a package of servers + network + software + end clients (PCs) without their pc division?
Here are a few facts from HPs earnings - The PC division of HP (PSG) makes up 29-30% of HPs revenue not 50%. IPG (printing) brings in 20% revenue and Services+ESSN(Servers) pulls in a hefty 45% of HP's revenue. That's revenue but more importantly the focus is on profit. PSG is only gathering 12-15% of HP's total profit(not bad but not it's core) and that is forecasted to shrink. IPG is pulling 28% of HP's total profits while Services+ESSN is pulling in 55% of HP's profits. PSG is potentially not getting "canned". They are optioning selling off or spinning off the PSG division. A spin-off would likely maintain the HP brand and be backed by HP. Either way it's a low profit and risky market. As for packages of services, yes it would be nice to sell the whole package but appartently other comanies such as IBM and Accenture even Oracle can sell services with hardware and not have a leg in the pc market. That's what HP is focusing on. The earnings are high and the profits follow. Not many people understand that HP is the second largest IT services company in the world
Agreed. If you are an unknown source calling into question the validity of a highly known and respected source then you need facts. Otherwise save it for Facebook or Twitter or where ever else you post non fact based comments.
I have yet to see what you're talking about. And I've been reading on this site for a few years....before I even knew what chips went inside of phones...or even knowing cpus, gpu's were even being used at all in phones.
I've got Amazon set on check4change in Firefox for when the updated pricing goes live there (supposed to be 8/20). I wonder whether they will also drop the Veer in pricing.
I was excited for the Pre 3 too, too bad it'll never see the light of day in the USA. Maybe they'll liquidate those stocks too, they must exist somewhere.
What worries me is that HP want to turn themselves in to a software company rather than hardware yet it is the lack of software development that has let them down with the whole Palm WebOS piece.
Hardware is probably the thing that HP has generally done well, granted there isn't the money there any more, but really HP and software what have they ever done in that field? VMS, HP-UX remember them? Most of their stuff is crippled by poor development (WebJet admin still won't install on Windows 7) and lack of polish with clunky and flake UIs (WebOS anyone?)
While the article is quite thorough and does give a reasonable explanation of the unfortunate state of webOS, I am more than a bit surprised as to why Anandtech thought it needed to 'clear the air' here. This isn't the first time (and will certainly not be the last) where folks in blogs or forums throughout the internet blame a random vendor for something, but for Anandtech to come out 'defending' a company (Qualcomm in this case) is a bit alarming.
I've been reading tech blogs and sites ever since they started more than a decade ago and have always been a regular AT reader because of the unbiased nature of your articles and also because AT never really sides with any brand, vendor or company. I sincerely hope this article does not signal a change in the way AT handles reviews and articles in future!
I don't see how they're paying any special service to Qualcomm while dispelling myths... I read the article in question and saw other sites parrot it verbatim, Engadget even erroneously claimed the TouchPad had a single core SoC... That kinda blatant rumor mongering and headline grabbing (let's not call it journalism please) may seem obvious to you or me, but a lot of other people would read it and take it as gospel. AT's just trying to set the record straight.
If you've been following AT's discussion on the evolution of the mobile SoC space, you'd know that with each generation of ARM SoC, the performance has been roughly the same, with OMAP, A5, Tegra, and Snapdragon trading blows on different benchmarks and metrics. The kind of "two times" performance gains between a dual core A5 and Snapdragon SoCs are not simply possible from a sole hardware perspective. This isn't about being an improper Qualcomm apologist, but it's clearing the air of misinformation.
Not sure why you think I'm contending what Anand and Brian are saying here.
Please read my comment once more. I agree that the article itself is quite factual and explains the scenario very well.
What I'm not so comfortable with is how or why AT felt the need to 'clear the air of misinformation' as you say, when this is definitely not the first time a particular vendor has had fingers pointed at them by random, less than well informed bloggers, for what is basically not their fault.
This should have been more of a Pipeline post than a full-fledged article. I don't remember AT coming out to defend a myriad of other vendors who have been caught in a similarly difficult situations in the past.
I totally understand where this guy is coming from.
I personally don't have any problem with the article itself, but I was shocked to see AT write the article at all. Like the OP, I've seen plenty of misinformation on tons of subjects that AT covers, but I've NEVER seen them write an article to clear the air on any of those subjects. Why this one? Why this time? It's almost like they took is personally.
Exactly. The tone of the article seemed more like a knee-jerk reaction to defend Qualcomm than to really prove some already useless report wrong.
And just to make sure I wasn't out of my rockers, I did a quick search of AT and realized that there was absolutely no mention at all of the Apple-Samsung fiasco. Surely that would be something a lot more people are interested in knowing more about as it affects two of the major platforms and many major vendors, than how one vendor has been called out for the death of a platform that probably had less than 1% of the market.
Again, hope this article was just a one off. I can always hit up any one of the numerous blogs for product endorsements.
I think you are incorrect. This isn't an effort to defend Qualcomm, it reads more like an admonishment of HP for neglecting the performance aspect of webOS. Seems like the point of the article isn't that Qualcomm's feelings were hurt, but that HP made a mistake as a hardware manufacturer in not paying attention to software performance.
Which is a good thing to remind people of, since the biggest issue with, say, Android, is the actual real world performance, what with bloatware and custom UIs installed by the device maker.
This deserves an article due to the fact that HP is liquidating their TouchPads and a lot of people (including me) was thinking it was the hardware. But infact, it is due to HP not optimizing the hardware. WebOS was reportedly runs 2x faster on the iPad 2 than it does on HP's own hardware. This liquidation is breaking news and has made google news headlines. Why wouldn't it had its own article when he is giving out a ton of technical details that bloggers no nothing about.
My apologies if this came off as being something posted to protect Qualcomm, I just thought it was a fitting headline given the horrible misinformation that's been floating around.
You're right that it's not the first time folks have made silly claims online, nor will it be the last. This just struck a nerve with a lot of us. It was clear from the start that webOS needed work. Using silly things like Qualcomm as a scapegoat just seemed very wrong. I had some time so I started writing, Brian added his thoughts and we published. Nothing sinister, I promise :)
Pipeline is limited to ultra short pieces, I didn't figure it was a good fit there as we're trying to build that section to just be for ultra short/quick news to augment our in-depth coverage.
I liked seeing this article Anand and have no problem with it. Infact i think that you should start doing these kinds of articles with other similar BS myths and so called "news" thats contently posted around the web and gets lots of attention.
Just ordered from HP directly for 90.09 after tax (using code SAVE15HP) for the 16GB model (or code SAVE30HP) for the 32GB model. Used an academic account.
Arstechnica had an article today about this exact subject, and about how the hardware was such a limiting factor, and how it was designed over a year ago, and a bunch of other stuff.
And I was really quite sure that this could not be the case (in reference to speed). So thanks for taking the time to clear things up Anand.
I am bummed that WebOS may go the way of the dodo, as I really liked the interface and the way it acted. But it is slow, even on the TouchPad which has a lot of hardware.
What about developer relations? It is a key that many big companies use to push their products by offering development assistance to help the customer make a better product. Look at how well tuned apps are to intel processors because of this. Perhaps Qualcomm did not provide sufficient assistance to HP to make WebOS as fast as it could be.
I picked up a couple of Touchpads this evening. Fingers crossed that someone can figure out a way eventually to get honeycomb on the Touchpad.
I don't know if they actively sought developers out; but it appears they were responsive to anyone who contacted them. A friend of mine contacted HP and offered to port one of his employers games if they gave him hardware. He got both a phone and a tablet to play with.
Have to agree...I tried an Android tablet, but the user experience just wasn't there, so sold it and paid a lot more money for an iPad2. I'm itchin to upgrade my 2+ year old 3GS, but at the moment Android is a downgrade, so I'm just waiting for the next iPhone. I'll probably have to wait a month or more after it comes out because of all the hoopla. Pain in the ass to be tied to Apple products, but the user experience is worth it, IMO.
If this hardware sounds familiar to you it's because it's the modem-less version of the MSM8x60, the same SoC used in the "HTC Thunderbolt" and the EVO 3D.
I think HTC Thunderbolt didn't use the processor but HTC Sensation.
Well, HP is expecting too much in terms of sales when the product does not really measure up in terms of price or performance. It has not even given sufficient time to move the product much less the marketing effort being put into it.
If you look at the Android tablets, they took about 2 years to get to market, then it started moving but not as fast due to the higher price points. If HP were to position the price at $350 initially, it would have moved volumes compared to their initial prices. They did not learn from Xoom pricing which had to be slashed to move the product. The market is more elastic than it seems, so the marketing people are not doing their jobs.
How could Qualcomm be at fault for their SoCs ?. There are plenty of QualComm Soc smartphones that are plenty fast and selling very well in the market.
Yeah at 100.00 bucks these things are flying off the shelves! I find it odd no one as figured out that to beat Apple they should sell their pad for less not more or even the same. I want competition not more of the same.
No, the Scorpion core is in-order. It is basically a Cortex-A8 clone, with almost identical integer performance. It supports out-of-order completion of instructions which is something entirely different. Instructions are always executed in-order, but memory instructions use a much longer pipeline which means that simpler instructions which execute afterwards may complete earlier.
While out-of-order completion improves performance, any cache miss will still stall the whole core. Given that Cortex-A8 does not support out-of-order completion, and is usually a little faster than Scorpion, it is safe to say that out-of-order completion doesn't provide much performance gain.
An out-of-order core executes instructions out-of-order using register renaming but always completes them in-order. This provides substantial performance gains (20-50%) as the core can continue executing independent instructions after a cache miss. This explains why Scorpion cores have a hard time keeping up with the Cortex-A9, as evidenced by the benchmark results.
"The TouchPad needed more work, and webOS as a whole needs more work. You can either scale a project out by taking more time to get it done, or you can scale its width by committing more resources to it. The latter (and more efficient development) is what Palm has needed since day one, what HP promised to bring to it, and sadly exactly what it ultimately failed to receive at HP."
Sigh, the parallels with what happened to MeeGo inside Nokia are uncanny. Symbian kept winning the departmental funding wars until far too late. As a result Maemo had much less resources, was scaled-out, & need more time. It didn't get the focus it deserved/needed until Jan 2010, the rest is history. Despite popular misconception, the merging with Moblin into Meego had little impact on Harmattan's progress compared to the aforementioned.
Symbian and MeeGo uses the exact same framework for the applications so there never really was any war, Symbian was carrying QtMobility forward. All the APIs are implemented on Harmattan too. It is a cross-platform runtime/framework and it is a mature runtime/framework/ecosystem/SDK/platform you need. Mango simply isn't getting up to date either it is just trying to catch up technically. It's just a case of killing things too early/before market entry. WebOS was never really launched in a major product by HP as they never got the Pre3 out. Nokia on the other hand had a production used SDK that it ported to run on both Symbian and Linux so it hardly looked hopeless there, however you do have to cancel products some times even before market entry this just wasn't clear that it was the right products that got canceled.
Also such things like making it run on the platforms/SoC's is also up to the hardware vendors, and of course platforms like Symbian, Android and even MeeGo which was getting drivers and whole board support packages for several SoCs when Nokia didn't want it any longer as well as the Linux Kernel in general. It's far easier for WebOS to work for a large range of devices then say WP7. MeeGo was essentially put of the map before they got the bits put together with Nokia's regard. Switching from Clutter to Qt was a good move though if they really would have went through with it fully. It wasn't a question of the OS itself there rather the platform on top of it which isn't OS-bound.
It also kinda is like if they would have given up at RIM with the Blackberry Playbook after 45 days. It's ridiculous and no tablet really other then Apple's which wasn't a finished product itself when released, is gonna take off the first minute it is released. If so it would really only be Apple and Samsung on the market. Here in Sweden they never got to release either the TouchPad or the Veer here for that matter. I don't think you can really judge a platform within 30 days as HP management did, it wasn't even a world release, third party software was of course lagging and would of course be lacking as long as they only had the touchpad and veer on the market. It might been out on the selfs in the US but still just as Palm failed wasn't a world release and wasn't given time for the software to be worked out. It would be quite odd if you could create a software platform and framework which would work on tablets alone today. Not many would be familiar with such a platform.
To all those "haters" and paranoid people about Anand selling out to qualcomm, they should find better things to waste their time on, rather than pointing fingers and being useless witchhunters.
I found the article to be as fair as possible and technically "enlightening", if one would see other articles out there that say, "oh webOS runs 2x faster on the ipad2", then most would come to the strict conclusion that hp's touchpad's hardware was the sole thing to blame. But when one examine's the touchpad's hardware the whole story doesn't make sense. Anand basically broke it down for us and shed some light on the subject matter, which I thought was cool and appreciated it as a reader.
From what I get, certain aspects would run faster on different hardware, again, not because the hardware is "that much more superior", but because the old code was optimized for other hardware as well.
Any how, here's to hoping that webOS will either: a.) improve...or b.) someone does a good port of android OS to the touchpad's hardware...as I keep my eye out for a low priced touchdpad, :P
If we're into clearing up mistaken information on the web, why are you ignoring this?
Mojo based WebOS apps can run in Safari.
Palm's very first webcast introducing the WebOS app environment to potential developers featured writing demo app code in Textmate on a Macintosh and then running that demo app on top of Safari.
I think it's pretty clear that ANAND has sold out to the INTARWEB because of how quickly he used it to past ALL HIS ARTICLES. I know this because I've been reading lots of OTHER TECH BLOGS and they are much more CRITICAL of NON-INTARWEB communication!
I mean, Anand hasn't even mentioned the Verizon strike that's been going on. Should he mention such a major issue in telecommunications? Of course not, it's because he's in the INTARWEB DIRTY MONEY BUSINESS.
"I mean, Anand hasn't even mentioned the Verizon strike that's been going on."
If you've been an avid Anandtech reader, then you would know they don't waste their time on politics and issues of that nature. If you want that kind of "intarweb" "buzz" then that's what Dailytech is for. Anandtech has always focused more on technical articles, educating the reader, breaking things down in an informative manner.
I vouch for Anandtech because I've been an avid reader of their articles since 2003, and though no review is perfect, something that I always respected Anandtech for was their thorough in-depth breakdowns of subject matters and drawing logical conclusions(as best as possible, drawn from the subjective/objective data). This goes generally for all their veteran staff, which I haven't seen some of them post articles in a while.
...On a random note, whatever happened to Kristopher Kubicki? I don't even see Dailytech posts by him anymore?
Any how... again... the stuff on here is just a technical breakdown with some insight, perhaps it could have been titled better, but after reading the article I see no reason to try and please the crowd when spitting it out in your own way.
I like this kind of article when you see the internets abuzz, and by that I mean the bigger blogging sites, with misinformation. A lot of sites were reporting on this and a nice little write up explaining why it was untrue and didn't even make sense is a good thing. Not everyone knows these things, and even I who understands this, and is well read up enough at least to notice the BS that engadget and others were putting out, enjoyed reading this. This is my favorite tech site. Just wish you guys posted more :p. Keep up the good work.
I can't ever remember thinking an Anand article was way off target, but this one is. You dedicated 3 pages to telling us this wasn't a hardware issue, and then showed a benchmark illustrating the TouchPad was half the speed of the iPad 2, which has fairly modest hardware specs. If you reviewed the latest AMD chip and showed it at half the speed of a 6 month old Intel processor, you wouldn't claim it has 'similar performance'. I really don't get that.
The irony here of course isn't you letting a 200% performance gap go, it's that NO ONE is saying the reason the TouchPad bombed is because of overall performance. Leaping to it's defense seems a little weird.
I don't even agree that the issue is WebOS - it's a fine operating system that had a lot of promise. The issues were:
- Terrible design and build quality (it looked and felt like a budget iPad) - Non-existant or poor marketing (Glee? Really?) - No integration within anything meaningful. Android has the entire Google eco system, while Apple has iTunes and virtually everything else
Maybe read this too early on a Sunday morning, but you seem to be trying to prove a point that just isn't there.
I think that would seem to be the case. The only argument Anand is making is that the poor performance you see - "then showed a benchmark illustrating the TouchPad was half the speed of the iPad 2" - is due to the software and not the hardware. That still makes the TouchPad a lousy device, but the purpose of the article is to establish why.
And someone did say the problem was the TouchPad's performance: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/19/hp-tested-w... . That's the article that spurred this one, since the idea that a dual-core A9 is twice as fast as a dual-core Snapdragon (clocked 20% higher) is silly.
Snapdragon ~= Tegra 2 (source: many, many AT phone reviews) Tegra 2 ~= Apple A5 (source: AT Galaxy Tab 10.1 review) QED: Snapdragon ~= Apple A5
Hence the idea that the iPad (Apple A5) platform being twice as fast as the Snapdragon platform is silly. The software stinks, the hardware is fine.
No, he said that it had similar performance to the Tegra 2, then showed the huge performance difference between them, showing that its a software thing and not a CPU thing.
I was already suspicious of these other websites claiming Qualcomm's incompetency. It seemed pretty hard to believe given the amount of inefficient bloat HP's Windows machines come with. In such a competitive market as tablets now, manufacturer's have exactly *one* shot to prove they are up to snuff, and I can't say I've been terribly impressed with HP's build quality hardware wise in recent years, much less all the software they try and foist upon people. What's funny is that the software is so incredibly important and is often the most ignored. A well optimized program can make all the difference in the world. People respond to a clean, snappy interface; hence Apple's success.
A ZDNet article on 8/21 by James Kendrick claims "..There is so much event logging in the background that it seriously impacts the TouchPad’s performance, as it is constantly doing things it doesn’t need to do." He then goes on to show how to disable the logging mechanism. Here's the link: http://tinyurl.com/4xwkuat
How about a quantitative analysis to compare before / after performance? :D
Amusingly in the context of the reports of these being sold in stores for $100, the true market value right now seems to be $280. This whole thing is a very dumb move by HP. They had a reasonable thesis when they acquired Palm -- vertical integration within the enterprise. As with Apple, they could and should have started by targetting consumer market first. Now they'll sell it off and give up one of the few legs up they could have had on IBM. Advantage Google/Motorola.
Would be nice if you could get some devs to speak about working with WebOS and what they think the platform would need to take off, just as an "outsiders' " perspective. You know?
I still fail to see how this is HP's fault. Maybe it's HP's fault in name because they acquired Palm and all its webOS engineers. However, I still feel the issue and problem was an inherent issue of Palm's that HP took on when they acquired them. As mentioned in the article, there are simple ways to have improved the performance of webOS and yet for the past how many years has that not been done precisely? I don't expect a company like HP that's not a software company to be able to step in and say, "Yep, yep. See there Mr. webOS software engineer. Here's your problem."
If there's anyone to blame, blame Palm and all of the legacy engineers that HP inherited. How much more resources did HP need to commit to webOS when one author of an article on AnandTech can discern a few that would bring notable performance improvements? Scaling the project out by taking more time was not an option, especially when HP is being crucified by the media for taking their sweet time bring a webOS tablet to the market. Then, when they do, they get lambasted because it's undercooked.
This was a losing proposition for HP no matter how they swung it. Saying that "consumers" were disappointed is giving consumers too much credit. No one mourns the death of webOS. If we did, we'd have been picking up webOS devices from the start, fueling its development. HP was smart by getting out while it still could. Especially in this crazy patent litigating industry, they might even be able to off-load those patents at a profit to el Googs.
Anand, I appreciate you taking the time to explain some of these rumors and talks but as I read through your explanations I'm asking myself why in the world would you need to. You're basically telling people that because it is a different OS it will require different drives, encoders, decoders and what not. Having to explain this to your audience here is quite pathetic imo. Sure they may be some that are too worked up to see the reasons you've outlined but still, it should have been expected from a more knowledgeable crowd.
It feels as though you are schooling many of the users here and that is just quite sad. I thought many here were professional enough to have thought this through, pass the drivers and basic necessity that an OS requires. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing you, I'm just saying I'm disappointed in the audience because you had to take the time to clear some of these basic issues up. Quite sad.
Ok, I just read Anand's own Jason Mick's article on WebOS. Yea, great headliner to have people start arguing alright. Do us a favor and fire his stupid a** reporting. If you need brain dead reporters that just pick things without thinking first, go to a pet shop and find a bird or rabbit.
So with that adding to the confusion and rumors, you're here defending that idiots' reporting. And yes, that was one God aweful thread as well ending with his "I really don't know and I think it's this and that..." comments. Jesus Christ.
The author start confusing when he trying to prove that there is no hardware problem by saying that the CPU is fine. I'm sure a lot of people here have built their PC before. So, the analogy that CPU=hardware is not valid. Even given that it's CPU package, still shouldn't the author treat the tablet PCB like a motherboard. The whole article totally ignore the existance of the PCB. I'm sure the argument that the software/OS is not optimize, but it is iffy to start blanking a variable here and dumping the whole problem on OS. I guess this answer will be fully answer when we start seeing Android custom ROM on the tablet. But either way the fault still on HP regardless of whether it's hardware or software.
2. the CPU instruction set revision should be largely irrelevant: it's Linux, so it's C, not assembly; therefore it's mostly just a matter of re-compiling. Yes, SMD optimizations (if done manually) are an exception.
I picked up two 16GB Touchpads for my wife and I at Best Buy Saturday night. ...and I'm KICKING myself for not getting the 32GB versions they also had there. A few movies later and my device is already full. I wish it had a FlashCard reader for additional memory, that part sucks.
But other than that I really LOVE this tablet. The email program is better than Outlook and the other webmail systems I use. The browser renders nice and some of the games are great. The $10 Need for Speed game is AMAZING, the graphics are fantastic, no lag, great detail. I can't believe how good the graphics are on this thing. It totally blows the iPad away in the gaming/graphics power area. It's got a dual-core 1.5ghz CPU which you can overclock to 1.7 with a little effort.
In short, for $100 this was the deal of a lifetime for me. I had no interest in tablets before (due to price point), but now I'm in love. It sure beats a laptop in bed/couch for casual email and web browsing. Also great for movies on the go for the kids or games to keep them all busy.
I hope HP opens up WebOS to the devewloper community, this little platform could really flourish if opened up to all for free. Open source could make this thing take off. With a few tweaks in the UI and cusomtization department I can see the TouchPad becoming a legenday device, a coveted item to own and something that another manufacturer will want to start developing hardware for!
Sorry I do not agree with your article. People buy to much into these benchmarks used on tablets and phones. They are inaccurate and unproven. Also the architecture of the CPUs look good on paper but most do not understand them and only take what the engineers have to say. I believe the snap dragon is the AMD in this tablet war and the a5 is the intel. I think once we see another os ported on the touchpad that soc was a large part of the fault.
I'm mostly an Apple guy (iPad, iPhone, iMac, iPod...), but I was rooting for WebOS -- I had heard it was a decent OS. Apple needs competition so that Apple products get better (and to give users an escape hatch if Apple keeps trying to control user content too much!)
What surprised me most was how fast this all went down. If HP wasn't fully committed to WebOS and tablets for the long haul, then why'd they spend money and time on buying Palm and developing a tablet? It just seems a colossal waste -- and surely a morale buster inside the company.
I recently put Cyanogenmod 9 alpha 3 on my hp touchpad, and the difference is night and day. I honestly thought this was an under powered tablet because of the performance I was getting on webos. NOPE, with android this baby flies! I'm sure the asus transformer prime or ipad 3 would put it to shame, but it has all the power I need to game, browse pdfs, web pages, video, whatever, and Cyanogenmod 9 is still in alpha and full of bugs! But it has the hardware acceleration and thats probably the biggest jump in performance.
It's not the hardware, it's webOS holding back the touchpad. As much as I liked the swipe gestures, the deserted app market, and laggy performance makes having android on it all the sweeter!
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Zink - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
Good job being though, I was kind of surprised at some of the stuff that got posted elsewhere .Zink - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
*thoroughHP never fully committed to fixing the OS and marketing that was already struggling in the hands of Palm so it is not really a surprise what happened.
Zink - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
I picked up an open box 16gb at futureshop in ontario for $89.99 and am using it right now. Try to snag one for $100 or $150 too. I don't really get it, why didn't they drop to $200, why go so low?piiman - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
are you complaining they made it too low? The only problem I see with them being 100.00 is they are flying off the shelf before I can get there. This may the the slowest pad out there but for 100.00 or less I bite!Watwatwat - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
because they burned the product which had already been failing, now who wants to buy that kind of discontinued failure for a small discount, you have to rip the bandaid off fast. it does them no good to drag it out, these things lose value by the day, and they need some money back asap, salvage what is left and be done with it. time is money, no time should be spent on a dead product line.Zoomer - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
Not true, go look at ebay. People are buying them for alot more than $100. Given how fast they are selling at $100, HP could have priced them more, easy.Conclusion: That software guy is an idiot. Canning their pc division is a very risky move, considering it makes up about half their revenues. If this new direction fails, they are in deep shit. And enterprises usually wants to buy a package; how are they going to offer a package of servers + network + software + end clients (PCs) without their pc division?
boobot - Monday, August 29, 2011 - link
Here are a few facts from HPs earnings - The PC division of HP (PSG) makes up 29-30% of HPs revenue not 50%. IPG (printing) brings in 20% revenue and Services+ESSN(Servers) pulls in a hefty 45% of HP's revenue. That's revenue but more importantly the focus is on profit. PSG is only gathering 12-15% of HP's total profit(not bad but not it's core) and that is forecasted to shrink. IPG is pulling 28% of HP's total profits while Services+ESSN is pulling in 55% of HP's profits. PSG is potentially not getting "canned". They are optioning selling off or spinning off the PSG division. A spin-off would likely maintain the HP brand and be backed by HP. Either way it's a low profit and risky market. As for packages of services, yes it would be nice to sell the whole package but appartently other comanies such as IBM and Accenture even Oracle can sell services with hardware and not have a leg in the pc market. That's what HP is focusing on. The earnings are high and the profits follow. Not many people understand that HP is the second largest IT services company in the worldjavaflash - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
Mr. Anand Lal Shimpi has been behaving like a Quadcomm salesman for quite some time.There is a clear pattern of bias among his reviews where Quadcomm was always favored, and other chipmakers were marginalized even criticized.
I am concerned that there is an ulterior(financial) motive.
NCM - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
Then, Mr. javaflash, you'd better have some actual data, other than your unsupported opinion, to back that up.m.amitava - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
QuaDcomm?? LOL...LoneWolf15 - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
"There is a clear pattern of bias among his reviews where Quadcomm was always favored, and other chipmakers were marginalized even criticized."** - Citation needed.
MrSewerPickle - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
Agreed. If you are an unknown source calling into question the validity of a highly known and respected source then you need facts. Otherwise save it for Facebook or Twitter or where ever else you post non fact based comments.jmcb - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
I have yet to see what you're talking about. And I've been reading on this site for a few years....before I even knew what chips went inside of phones...or even knowing cpus, gpu's were even being used at all in phones.Griswold - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
Cant spell Qualcomm right but accuses him of being paid by Qualcomm.softdrinkviking - Saturday, August 27, 2011 - link
pro11y just a troll. I mean, he really pulled that out of his a$$. Just wants attention.jjj - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
HP is about to start selling the Touchpad for 100/150$ (16/32 gigs model).Bestbuy Canada already is http://www.bestbuy.ca/en-CA/product/hewlett-packar...
Brian Klug - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
I've got Amazon set on check4change in Firefox for when the updated pricing goes live there (supposed to be 8/20). I wonder whether they will also drop the Veer in pricing.I was excited for the Pre 3 too, too bad it'll never see the light of day in the USA. Maybe they'll liquidate those stocks too, they must exist somewhere.
-Brian
lorribot - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
What worries me is that HP want to turn themselves in to a software company rather than hardware yet it is the lack of software development that has let them down with the whole Palm WebOS piece.Hardware is probably the thing that HP has generally done well, granted there isn't the money there any more, but really HP and software what have they ever done in that field?
VMS, HP-UX remember them? Most of their stuff is crippled by poor development (WebJet admin still won't install on Windows 7) and lack of polish with clunky and flake UIs (WebOS anyone?)
z0mb13n3d - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
While the article is quite thorough and does give a reasonable explanation of the unfortunate state of webOS, I am more than a bit surprised as to why Anandtech thought it needed to 'clear the air' here. This isn't the first time (and will certainly not be the last) where folks in blogs or forums throughout the internet blame a random vendor for something, but for Anandtech to come out 'defending' a company (Qualcomm in this case) is a bit alarming.I've been reading tech blogs and sites ever since they started more than a decade ago and have always been a regular AT reader because of the unbiased nature of your articles and also because AT never really sides with any brand, vendor or company. I sincerely hope this article does not signal a change in the way AT handles reviews and articles in future!
sprockkets - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
Why it is a bit "alarming"? Either qualcomm or hp would come out looking bad, so either way would it look bad to you?Impulses - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
I don't see how they're paying any special service to Qualcomm while dispelling myths... I read the article in question and saw other sites parrot it verbatim, Engadget even erroneously claimed the TouchPad had a single core SoC... That kinda blatant rumor mongering and headline grabbing (let's not call it journalism please) may seem obvious to you or me, but a lot of other people would read it and take it as gospel. AT's just trying to set the record straight.NeoteriX - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
Seriously, what are you talking about?If you've been following AT's discussion on the evolution of the mobile SoC space, you'd know that with each generation of ARM SoC, the performance has been roughly the same, with OMAP, A5, Tegra, and Snapdragon trading blows on different benchmarks and metrics. The kind of "two times" performance gains between a dual core A5 and Snapdragon SoCs are not simply possible from a sole hardware perspective. This isn't about being an improper Qualcomm apologist, but it's clearing the air of misinformation.
z0mb13n3d - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
Not sure why you think I'm contending what Anand and Brian are saying here.Please read my comment once more. I agree that the article itself is quite factual and explains the scenario very well.
What I'm not so comfortable with is how or why AT felt the need to 'clear the air of misinformation' as you say, when this is definitely not the first time a particular vendor has had fingers pointed at them by random, less than well informed bloggers, for what is basically not their fault.
This should have been more of a Pipeline post than a full-fledged article. I don't remember AT coming out to defend a myriad of other vendors who have been caught in a similarly difficult situations in the past.
bplewis24 - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
I totally understand where this guy is coming from.I personally don't have any problem with the article itself, but I was shocked to see AT write the article at all. Like the OP, I've seen plenty of misinformation on tons of subjects that AT covers, but I've NEVER seen them write an article to clear the air on any of those subjects. Why this one? Why this time? It's almost like they took is personally.
It's just an odd development IMO.
z0mb13n3d - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
Exactly. The tone of the article seemed more like a knee-jerk reaction to defend Qualcomm than to really prove some already useless report wrong.And just to make sure I wasn't out of my rockers, I did a quick search of AT and realized that there was absolutely no mention at all of the Apple-Samsung fiasco. Surely that would be something a lot more people are interested in knowing more about as it affects two of the major platforms and many major vendors, than how one vendor has been called out for the death of a platform that probably had less than 1% of the market.
Again, hope this article was just a one off. I can always hit up any one of the numerous blogs for product endorsements.
GrizzledYoungMan - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
I think you are incorrect. This isn't an effort to defend Qualcomm, it reads more like an admonishment of HP for neglecting the performance aspect of webOS. Seems like the point of the article isn't that Qualcomm's feelings were hurt, but that HP made a mistake as a hardware manufacturer in not paying attention to software performance.Which is a good thing to remind people of, since the biggest issue with, say, Android, is the actual real world performance, what with bloatware and custom UIs installed by the device maker.
feelingshorter - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
This deserves an article due to the fact that HP is liquidating their TouchPads and a lot of people (including me) was thinking it was the hardware. But infact, it is due to HP not optimizing the hardware. WebOS was reportedly runs 2x faster on the iPad 2 than it does on HP's own hardware. This liquidation is breaking news and has made google news headlines. Why wouldn't it had its own article when he is giving out a ton of technical details that bloggers no nothing about.Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
My apologies if this came off as being something posted to protect Qualcomm, I just thought it was a fitting headline given the horrible misinformation that's been floating around.You're right that it's not the first time folks have made silly claims online, nor will it be the last. This just struck a nerve with a lot of us. It was clear from the start that webOS needed work. Using silly things like Qualcomm as a scapegoat just seemed very wrong. I had some time so I started writing, Brian added his thoughts and we published. Nothing sinister, I promise :)
Pipeline is limited to ultra short pieces, I didn't figure it was a good fit there as we're trying to build that section to just be for ultra short/quick news to augment our in-depth coverage.
Take care,
Anand
B3an - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
I liked seeing this article Anand and have no problem with it. Infact i think that you should start doing these kinds of articles with other similar BS myths and so called "news" thats contently posted around the web and gets lots of attention.Kaboose - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
Just ordered from HP directly for 90.09 after tax (using code SAVE15HP) for the 16GB model (or code SAVE30HP) for the 32GB model. Used an academic account.kmmatney - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
Damn....that's cheap!piiman - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
they are sold out now :-(Stuka87 - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
Arstechnica had an article today about this exact subject, and about how the hardware was such a limiting factor, and how it was designed over a year ago, and a bunch of other stuff.And I was really quite sure that this could not be the case (in reference to speed). So thanks for taking the time to clear things up Anand.
I am bummed that WebOS may go the way of the dodo, as I really liked the interface and the way it acted. But it is slow, even on the TouchPad which has a lot of hardware.
killerroach - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
That being said, Ars does have a pretty long-standing tradition of taking glee in the hardships of anybody not named Apple.AmdInside - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
What about developer relations? It is a key that many big companies use to push their products by offering development assistance to help the customer make a better product. Look at how well tuned apps are to intel processors because of this. Perhaps Qualcomm did not provide sufficient assistance to HP to make WebOS as fast as it could be.I picked up a couple of Touchpads this evening. Fingers crossed that someone can figure out a way eventually to get honeycomb on the Touchpad.
DanNeely - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
I don't know if they actively sought developers out; but it appears they were responsive to anyone who contacted them. A friend of mine contacted HP and offered to port one of his employers games if they gave him hardware. He got both a phone and a tablet to play with.GrizzledYoungMan - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
How poopy the actual Android user experience is.kmmatney - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
Have to agree...I tried an Android tablet, but the user experience just wasn't there, so sold it and paid a lot more money for an iPad2. I'm itchin to upgrade my 2+ year old 3GS, but at the moment Android is a downgrade, so I'm just waiting for the next iPhone. I'll probably have to wait a month or more after it comes out because of all the hoopla. Pain in the ass to be tied to Apple products, but the user experience is worth it, IMO.piiman - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
Please define "user experience"Sterman - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
you know... that magical thingy that makes you feel good inside.g1011999 - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
If this hardware sounds familiar to you it's because it's the modem-less version of the MSM8x60, the same SoC used in the "HTC Thunderbolt" and the EVO 3D.I think HTC Thunderbolt didn't use the processor but HTC Sensation.
fteoath64 - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
Well, HP is expecting too much in terms of sales when the product does not really measure up in terms of price or performance. It has not even given sufficient time to move the product much less the marketing effort being put into it.If you look at the Android tablets, they took about 2 years to get to market, then it started moving but not as fast due to the higher price points. If HP were to position the price at $350 initially, it would have moved volumes compared to their initial prices. They did not learn from Xoom pricing which had to be slashed to move the product. The market is more elastic than it seems, so the marketing people are not doing their jobs.
How could Qualcomm be at fault for their SoCs ?. There are plenty of QualComm Soc smartphones that are plenty fast and selling very well in the market.
piiman - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
Yeah at 100.00 bucks these things are flying off the shelves! I find it odd no one as figured out that to beat Apple they should sell their pad for less not more or even the same. I want competition not more of the same.DaemonES - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
Scorpion core performing in out-of-order. Article mentioned it like in-order.Wilco1 - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
No, the Scorpion core is in-order. It is basically a Cortex-A8 clone, with almost identical integer performance. It supports out-of-order completion of instructions which is something entirely different. Instructions are always executed in-order, but memory instructions use a much longer pipeline which means that simpler instructions which execute afterwards may complete earlier.While out-of-order completion improves performance, any cache miss will still stall the whole core. Given that Cortex-A8 does not support out-of-order completion, and is usually a little faster than Scorpion, it is safe to say that out-of-order completion doesn't provide much performance gain.
An out-of-order core executes instructions out-of-order using register renaming but always completes them in-order. This provides substantial performance gains (20-50%) as the core can continue executing independent instructions after a cache miss. This explains why Scorpion cores have a hard time keeping up with the Cortex-A9, as evidenced by the benchmark results.
Wilco
vshah - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
"the same SoC used in the HTC Thunderbolt and the EVO 3D "Should be HTC Sensation, no?
jed22281 - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
"The TouchPad needed more work, and webOS as a whole needs more work. You can either scale a project out by taking more time to get it done, or you can scale its width by committing more resources to it. The latter (and more efficient development) is what Palm has needed since day one, what HP promised to bring to it, and sadly exactly what it ultimately failed to receive at HP."Sigh, the parallels with what happened to MeeGo inside Nokia are uncanny.
Symbian kept winning the departmental funding wars until far too late.
As a result Maemo had much less resources, was scaled-out, & need more time.
It didn't get the focus it deserved/needed until Jan 2010, the rest is history.
Despite popular misconception, the merging with Moblin into Meego had little impact on Harmattan's progress compared to the aforementioned.
Penti - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
Symbian and MeeGo uses the exact same framework for the applications so there never really was any war, Symbian was carrying QtMobility forward. All the APIs are implemented on Harmattan too. It is a cross-platform runtime/framework and it is a mature runtime/framework/ecosystem/SDK/platform you need. Mango simply isn't getting up to date either it is just trying to catch up technically. It's just a case of killing things too early/before market entry. WebOS was never really launched in a major product by HP as they never got the Pre3 out. Nokia on the other hand had a production used SDK that it ported to run on both Symbian and Linux so it hardly looked hopeless there, however you do have to cancel products some times even before market entry this just wasn't clear that it was the right products that got canceled.Also such things like making it run on the platforms/SoC's is also up to the hardware vendors, and of course platforms like Symbian, Android and even MeeGo which was getting drivers and whole board support packages for several SoCs when Nokia didn't want it any longer as well as the Linux Kernel in general. It's far easier for WebOS to work for a large range of devices then say WP7. MeeGo was essentially put of the map before they got the bits put together with Nokia's regard. Switching from Clutter to Qt was a good move though if they really would have went through with it fully. It wasn't a question of the OS itself there rather the platform on top of it which isn't OS-bound.
It also kinda is like if they would have given up at RIM with the Blackberry Playbook after 45 days. It's ridiculous and no tablet really other then Apple's which wasn't a finished product itself when released, is gonna take off the first minute it is released. If so it would really only be Apple and Samsung on the market. Here in Sweden they never got to release either the TouchPad or the Veer here for that matter. I don't think you can really judge a platform within 30 days as HP management did, it wasn't even a world release, third party software was of course lagging and would of course be lacking as long as they only had the touchpad and veer on the market. It might been out on the selfs in the US but still just as Palm failed wasn't a world release and wasn't given time for the software to be worked out. It would be quite odd if you could create a software platform and framework which would work on tablets alone today. Not many would be familiar with such a platform.
ssnova - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
To all those "haters" and paranoid people about Anand selling out to qualcomm, they should find better things to waste their time on, rather than pointing fingers and being useless witchhunters.I found the article to be as fair as possible and technically "enlightening", if one would see other articles out there that say, "oh webOS runs 2x faster on the ipad2", then most would come to the strict conclusion that hp's touchpad's hardware was the sole thing to blame. But when one examine's the touchpad's hardware the whole story doesn't make sense. Anand basically broke it down for us and shed some light on the subject matter, which I thought was cool and appreciated it as a reader.
From what I get, certain aspects would run faster on different hardware, again, not because the hardware is "that much more superior", but because the old code was optimized for other hardware as well.
Any how, here's to hoping that webOS will either: a.) improve...or b.) someone does a good port of android OS to the touchpad's hardware...as I keep my eye out for a low priced touchdpad, :P
Keep on keeping on Anand, you the man!
BillBear - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
If we're into clearing up mistaken information on the web, why are you ignoring this?Mojo based WebOS apps can run in Safari.
Palm's very first webcast introducing the WebOS app environment to potential developers featured writing demo app code in Textmate on a Macintosh and then running that demo app on top of Safari.
You can still catch that webcast here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXS3SQauwPE
seapeople - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
I think it's pretty clear that ANAND has sold out to the INTARWEB because of how quickly he used it to past ALL HIS ARTICLES. I know this because I've been reading lots of OTHER TECH BLOGS and they are much more CRITICAL of NON-INTARWEB communication!I mean, Anand hasn't even mentioned the Verizon strike that's been going on. Should he mention such a major issue in telecommunications? Of course not, it's because he's in the INTARWEB DIRTY MONEY BUSINESS.
ssnova - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
"I mean, Anand hasn't even mentioned the Verizon strike that's been going on."If you've been an avid Anandtech reader, then you would know they don't waste their time on politics and issues of that nature. If you want that kind of "intarweb" "buzz" then that's what Dailytech is for. Anandtech has always focused more on technical articles, educating the reader, breaking things down in an informative manner.
I vouch for Anandtech because I've been an avid reader of their articles since 2003, and though no review is perfect, something that I always respected Anandtech for was their thorough in-depth breakdowns of subject matters and drawing logical conclusions(as best as possible, drawn from the subjective/objective data). This goes generally for all their veteran staff, which I haven't seen some of them post articles in a while.
...On a random note, whatever happened to Kristopher Kubicki? I don't even see Dailytech posts by him anymore?
Any how... again... the stuff on here is just a technical breakdown with some insight, perhaps it could have been titled better, but after reading the article I see no reason to try and please the crowd when spitting it out in your own way.
WeaselITB - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
@ssnovaI think you need to get your sarcasm-meter checked ...
-Weasel
jaysns - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
I like this kind of article when you see the internets abuzz, and by that I mean the bigger blogging sites, with misinformation. A lot of sites were reporting on this and a nice little write up explaining why it was untrue and didn't even make sense is a good thing. Not everyone knows these things, and even I who understands this, and is well read up enough at least to notice the BS that engadget and others were putting out, enjoyed reading this. This is my favorite tech site. Just wish you guys posted more :p. Keep up the good work.Zoolookuk - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
I can't ever remember thinking an Anand article was way off target, but this one is. You dedicated 3 pages to telling us this wasn't a hardware issue, and then showed a benchmark illustrating the TouchPad was half the speed of the iPad 2, which has fairly modest hardware specs. If you reviewed the latest AMD chip and showed it at half the speed of a 6 month old Intel processor, you wouldn't claim it has 'similar performance'. I really don't get that.The irony here of course isn't you letting a 200% performance gap go, it's that NO ONE is saying the reason the TouchPad bombed is because of overall performance. Leaping to it's defense seems a little weird.
I don't even agree that the issue is WebOS - it's a fine operating system that had a lot of promise. The issues were:
- Terrible design and build quality (it looked and felt like a budget iPad)
- Non-existant or poor marketing (Glee? Really?)
- No integration within anything meaningful. Android has the entire Google eco system, while Apple has iTunes and virtually everything else
Maybe read this too early on a Sunday morning, but you seem to be trying to prove a point that just isn't there.
ViRGE - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
"Maybe read this too early on a Sunday morning"I think that would seem to be the case. The only argument Anand is making is that the poor performance you see - "then showed a benchmark illustrating the TouchPad was half the speed of the iPad 2" - is due to the software and not the hardware. That still makes the TouchPad a lousy device, but the purpose of the article is to establish why.
And someone did say the problem was the TouchPad's performance: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/19/hp-tested-w... . That's the article that spurred this one, since the idea that a dual-core A9 is twice as fast as a dual-core Snapdragon (clocked 20% higher) is silly.
Snapdragon ~= Tegra 2 (source: many, many AT phone reviews)
Tegra 2 ~= Apple A5 (source: AT Galaxy Tab 10.1 review)
QED: Snapdragon ~= Apple A5
Hence the idea that the iPad (Apple A5) platform being twice as fast as the Snapdragon platform is silly. The software stinks, the hardware is fine.
tipoo - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
No, he said that it had similar performance to the Tegra 2, then showed the huge performance difference between them, showing that its a software thing and not a CPU thing.sirsoffrito - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
I was already suspicious of these other websites claiming Qualcomm's incompetency. It seemed pretty hard to believe given the amount of inefficient bloat HP's Windows machines come with. In such a competitive market as tablets now, manufacturer's have exactly *one* shot to prove they are up to snuff, and I can't say I've been terribly impressed with HP's build quality hardware wise in recent years, much less all the software they try and foist upon people. What's funny is that the software is so incredibly important and is often the most ignored. A well optimized program can make all the difference in the world. People respond to a clean, snappy interface; hence Apple's success.superccs - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
SO essentially you are saying that this device has legitimate hardware, just poor implementation...?Wouldn't this make this device a steal for rooters and modders?
Zoolookuk - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
The WebOS team apparently experimented with their OS on the iPad2 hardware, where it ran 'twice as fast' .http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/22/hp_r...
casteve - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
Anand:A ZDNet article on 8/21 by James Kendrick claims "..There is so much event logging in the background that it seriously impacts the TouchPad’s performance, as it is constantly doing things it doesn’t need to do." He then goes on to show how to disable the logging mechanism. Here's the link:
http://tinyurl.com/4xwkuat
How about a quantitative analysis to compare before / after performance? :D
pwcee - Thursday, August 25, 2011 - link
I agree, would love to see this done then tested and compared.tipoo - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
Thirded but probably too late for them to test it. Lots of people have said disabling logging makes it pretty zippy.ABR - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
Amusingly in the context of the reports of these being sold in stores for $100, the true market value right now seems to be $280. This whole thing is a very dumb move by HP. They had a reasonable thesis when they acquired Palm -- vertical integration within the enterprise. As with Apple, they could and should have started by targetting consumer market first. Now they'll sell it off and give up one of the few legs up they could have had on IBM. Advantage Google/Motorola.GotThumbs - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
I've been wondering if anyone has already tried this.tipoo - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
Android is being worked on and there is an alpha out for the Touchpad. iOS is not and will never be open source, so we have no way to port it.Omid.M - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
Anand & Brian,Would be nice if you could get some devs to speak about working with WebOS and what they think the platform would need to take off, just as an "outsiders' " perspective. You know?
-Omid
@moids
sooper_anandtech12 - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
I still fail to see how this is HP's fault. Maybe it's HP's fault in name because they acquired Palm and all its webOS engineers. However, I still feel the issue and problem was an inherent issue of Palm's that HP took on when they acquired them. As mentioned in the article, there are simple ways to have improved the performance of webOS and yet for the past how many years has that not been done precisely? I don't expect a company like HP that's not a software company to be able to step in and say, "Yep, yep. See there Mr. webOS software engineer. Here's your problem."If there's anyone to blame, blame Palm and all of the legacy engineers that HP inherited. How much more resources did HP need to commit to webOS when one author of an article on AnandTech can discern a few that would bring notable performance improvements? Scaling the project out by taking more time was not an option, especially when HP is being crucified by the media for taking their sweet time bring a webOS tablet to the market. Then, when they do, they get lambasted because it's undercooked.
This was a losing proposition for HP no matter how they swung it. Saying that "consumers" were disappointed is giving consumers too much credit. No one mourns the death of webOS. If we did, we'd have been picking up webOS devices from the start, fueling its development. HP was smart by getting out while it still could. Especially in this crazy patent litigating industry, they might even be able to off-load those patents at a profit to el Googs.
The0ne - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
Anand, I appreciate you taking the time to explain some of these rumors and talks but as I read through your explanations I'm asking myself why in the world would you need to. You're basically telling people that because it is a different OS it will require different drives, encoders, decoders and what not. Having to explain this to your audience here is quite pathetic imo. Sure they may be some that are too worked up to see the reasons you've outlined but still, it should have been expected from a more knowledgeable crowd.It feels as though you are schooling many of the users here and that is just quite sad. I thought many here were professional enough to have thought this through, pass the drivers and basic necessity that an OS requires. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing you, I'm just saying I'm disappointed in the audience because you had to take the time to clear some of these basic issues up. Quite sad.
The0ne - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
Edit:Ok, I just read Anand's own Jason Mick's article on WebOS. Yea, great headliner to have people start arguing alright. Do us a favor and fire his stupid a** reporting. If you need brain dead reporters that just pick things without thinking first, go to a pet shop and find a bird or rabbit.
So with that adding to the confusion and rumors, you're here defending that idiots' reporting. And yes, that was one God aweful thread as well ending with his "I really don't know and I think it's this and that..." comments. Jesus Christ.
someone0 - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
The author start confusing when he trying to prove that there is no hardware problem by saying that the CPU is fine. I'm sure a lot of people here have built their PC before. So, the analogy that CPU=hardware is not valid. Even given that it's CPU package, still shouldn't the author treat the tablet PCB like a motherboard. The whole article totally ignore the existance of the PCB. I'm sure the argument that the software/OS is not optimize, but it is iffy to start blanking a variable here and dumping the whole problem on OS. I guess this answer will be fully answer when we start seeing Android custom ROM on the tablet. But either way the fault still on HP regardless of whether it's hardware or software.tipoo - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
SoC, not CPU. There's a reason these are called System on a Chip(s).bobbozzo - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
1. s/morover/moreover/ on Page12. the CPU instruction set revision should be largely irrelevant:
it's Linux, so it's C, not assembly; therefore it's mostly just a matter of re-compiling. Yes, SMD optimizations (if done manually) are an exception.
p05esto - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
I picked up two 16GB Touchpads for my wife and I at Best Buy Saturday night. ...and I'm KICKING myself for not getting the 32GB versions they also had there. A few movies later and my device is already full. I wish it had a FlashCard reader for additional memory, that part sucks.But other than that I really LOVE this tablet. The email program is better than Outlook and the other webmail systems I use. The browser renders nice and some of the games are great. The $10 Need for Speed game is AMAZING, the graphics are fantastic, no lag, great detail. I can't believe how good the graphics are on this thing. It totally blows the iPad away in the gaming/graphics power area. It's got a dual-core 1.5ghz CPU which you can overclock to 1.7 with a little effort.
In short, for $100 this was the deal of a lifetime for me. I had no interest in tablets before (due to price point), but now I'm in love. It sure beats a laptop in bed/couch for casual email and web browsing. Also great for movies on the go for the kids or games to keep them all busy.
I hope HP opens up WebOS to the devewloper community, this little platform could really flourish if opened up to all for free. Open source could make this thing take off. With a few tweaks in the UI and cusomtization department I can see the TouchPad becoming a legenday device, a coveted item to own and something that another manufacturer will want to start developing hardware for!
Chadder007 - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
And what....HP wants to be just a Software company now? LOLZextegra - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
Sorry I do not agree with your article. People buy to much into these benchmarks used on tablets and phones. They are inaccurate and unproven. Also the architecture of the CPUs look good on paper but most do not understand them and only take what the engineers have to say. I believe the snap dragon is the AMD in this tablet war and the a5 is the intel. I think once we see another os ported on the touchpad that soc was a large part of the fault.spunkybart - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 - link
I'm mostly an Apple guy (iPad, iPhone, iMac, iPod...), but I was rooting for WebOS -- I had heard it was a decent OS. Apple needs competition so that Apple products get better (and to give users an escape hatch if Apple keeps trying to control user content too much!)What surprised me most was how fast this all went down. If HP wasn't fully committed to WebOS and tablets for the long haul, then why'd they spend money and time on buying Palm and developing a tablet? It just seems a colossal waste -- and surely a morale buster inside the company.
amorexue - Sunday, September 25, 2011 - link
this is my site www.loveweddingdress.co.ukmattj7 - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
I recently put Cyanogenmod 9 alpha 3 on my hp touchpad, and the difference is night and day. I honestly thought this was an under powered tablet because of the performance I was getting on webos. NOPE, with android this baby flies! I'm sure the asus transformer prime or ipad 3 would put it to shame, but it has all the power I need to game, browse pdfs, web pages, video, whatever, and Cyanogenmod 9 is still in alpha and full of bugs! But it has the hardware acceleration and thats probably the biggest jump in performance.It's not the hardware, it's webOS holding back the touchpad. As much as I liked the swipe gestures, the deserted app market, and laggy performance makes having android on it all the sweeter!