HP Confirms Slate To Run WebOS

Kilrah_il writes "After HP bought Palm a few weeks ago, many rumors emerged regarding the new parent company's plans to further expand the scope of devices running WebOS. Now it appears that at least one of the rumors is true: The Slate will be running WebOS. 'Today an HP exec has confirmed that the company is developing a WebOS tablet which should be available by October.'"

Re:another one bites the dust

[s73v3r]

If that's what you want, there are a bunch of those available for you already. None of them have been very successful, and the only ones that sell in decent numbers are the convertible ones. Otherwise they're all like netbooks with the keyboard removed.

why don't you have a tablet PC?

[FuckingNickName]

I hear lots of bla bla tablets sucked before the iPad bla. But I had a Compaq TC1000 (2003 vintage) for a while and I fail to see what I was mising by not having an iPad. Stylus meant I could actually write, click on and move stuff around properly with it; lazy susan keyboard attachment meant I could treat it as a laptop. I had no need to fat-finger gestures when I had the precision of a pen-point - not that I'd have said no to gestures as an addition, but it's hardly a deal-breaker as far as being able to work and browse with a useful tablet device.

FWIW, I'll admit that the stylus was heavy - but this was fixed with the TC1100, which also featured a faster non-Transmeta CPU.

Re:Meh...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It is stylistically pretty similar to OSX(mostly FOSS guts, more or less proprietary UI and core applications), though it arguably leans slightly closer to "open" than OSX does. If only for lack of time and manpower, Palm didn't do very much to the stock linux layer(whereas, while it is a certified UNIX and all that, OSX is a bit of a culture shock coming from Linux or one of the classic BSDs) and the WebOS UI layer is largely rendered in HTML+CSS+javascript in a webkit-based system.

It isn't like android, where there is, in fact, an OSS release that you can actually download and build and go(except for proprietary Google components); but architecturally it is basically near-stock Linux(arguably more "stock" than Android's Linux layer) along with Webkit, with a few platform-specific javascript extensions to support program access to specific hardware features.

It isn't exactly the successor to OpenMoko; but it is basically a conglomeration of OSS components, and its "SDK" is extremely close to web development, with a few nonstandard bits and pieces for local application and hardware access stuff.

Re:Meh...

[Kilrah_il]

WebOS is very open: you can develop apps, like in all ecosystems, but also you can hack the OS, an act that is not frowned upon by Palm and is even encouraged ( http://www.precentral.net/palm-hearts-homebrew-community [precentral.net] ), although I agree they have not gone so far as to call it Open-Sourced.

Re:Meh...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In terms of hardware, HP has(within the limitations imposed by Intel and physics) pretty much been-there-done-that in terms of Wintel Tablets. Their TC1100, with ULV Pentium M, up to 2BG of RAM, 802.11b/g, bluetooth, and fully detachable keyboard was among the high-water marks of the genre. The only difference from what you mention is that the screen was stylus based, both because capacitive displays of that size weren't really available yet, and because XP really requires fairly fine pointing precision, unless you are running at an annoying low resolution, or have managed to get everything working with a nonstandard DPI setting.

They also have their line of "touchsmart" desktops, which run full Windows, have finger-touch screens(in the 20-inch range), and some vendor shovelware designed to give you some touch stuff to do. They aren't bad, per se, you don't pay much of a premium over standard wintel all-in-ones, and the touch can be a fun gimmick, but you don't exactly see them sprouting on every desk. As far as I can tell, the trouble is that, as long as the number of Windows boxes without touch vastly exceeds the number with, "touch support" is going to be an afterthought. MS has done about as well as can be expected in natively rendering touch events into mouse activity, so using applications that don't care is certainly possible; but it isn't terribly pleasant. There aren't many applications that explicitly go beyond that(aside from a few that support some gestures or something, or esoteric warehouse management stuff, and other bespoke specialty things).

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against people wanting Windows-based tablets. Given that building one will basically involve chopping the keyboard off a netbook and springing for a more expensive display, I'm sure that they'll get their wish. However, Windows-based tablets have been tried, off and on, for ages(Windows 3.1 had a Pen-computing add-on) and it has just never worked that well, outside of niche situations with a limited set of bespoke applications(at which point, unless your volume is tiny, you could probably get a ruggedized CE device with 4 times the battery life to do the job).

Already canceled Windows Slate

[SuperKendall]

They don't need to worry about Microsoft much since HP already cancelled [techcrunch.com] the WIndows version of the Slate.

Re:Meh...

[Lobachevsky]

Palm ditched PalmOS a long time ago. Their new OS is WebOS, which is Linux based, with a UI layer called Luna.

Re:another one bites the dust

[Provocateur]

I had worked on a register with a touchscreen, and WinXP. THe register part worked and you could enter data fast because things like scrollbars and buttons were huge. But when you had to switch to something in Control Panel for instance, since the widgets were normal size instead of touchscreen size, it would always be a struggle to move or close a window using any of the GUI buttons.

I agree, forget about using standard desktop OSes. And that's what the iPad is demonstrating.

Re:WebOS gets a bad rap

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I believe that the numbers typically quoted come from Pinch Media, who is the fairly big player in 3rd party analytics on the various iDevices, and who attempts to collect numbers on jailbroken devices and pirated application installs, among numerous other variables.