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Report: Best Buy tells HP to take back its TouchPads

arstechnica.com

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Re: Report: Best Buy tells HP to take back its TouchPads

#21

Post by canistr »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #20
canistr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really a 'problem' though if people understand what they want. What it really means is that HP needs to step up their game on all fronts to make a product and compel people to buy it. I mean, I tried the TouchPad. It's good in a lot of ways but mediocre in other ways. It's a lot like how the G1 launched. Die-hards bought it, the tech-savvy liked it but weren't 'flocking' to it, and the average consumer jus…

>HP needs something like a 'Droid' campaign to really spark interest in their products. I see a lot of Touchpad, Playbook and Xoom ads on TV. Atleast the Xoom ones seem to be on the level of the Droid ads(it's Motorola again, of course). The ads seem ok and cool but if the current sales figures are something to go by, don't seem to be very effective. As I said in another comment, it's easier to get people to buy a ph…

The way I see it is that Apple's commercials and most of the Droid commercials were compelling, head-turners. They were much more interesting. Whenever either of those commercials played, I wanted to watch them. I can't say the same thing of the TouchPad, Playbook, or Xoom ads. This quality of marketing were a part of what made the Droid and iProducts so successful.

Re: Report: Best Buy tells HP to take back its TouchPads

#23

Post by aaront »

huhtenberg wrote: post #13
j_col wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you apply the 3.0.2 patch (an over the air update), it resolves most of the performance issues with webOS on the tablet. Unfortunately all of the online reviews were done using 3.0, so the misconception that webOS on the Touchpad = slow has stuck.

I saw TouchPad at BestBuy last night and it was sluggish as hell. I don't really care if it had a patch applied or not. They had exactly one chance to make a great first impression and they failed. We can point finger at whoever, but what I saw pretty much explains why TouchPad did not gather interest with BestBuy buyers .

This is a known issue to HP. It really stinks. The demo units aren't even using 3.0, they're using a special demo build.

Re: Report: Best Buy tells HP to take back its TouchPads

#24

Post by petervandijck »

j_col wrote: post #11
mgkimsal wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a misconception. If I use webOS on a touchpad - as it comes out of the box - it's slow. There were 'misconceptions' that Java was slow too. And Java was slow. And still is in some use cases. But somehow that's the fault of the user, not the technology?

webOS out of the box will auto-update itself over the air to 3.0.2. It just wasn't available when the reviews were written. If I read a review now, it's based on outdated information.

That's like saying "sorry I didn't brush my teeth before our first date, but I brushed them now! Tonight at 5? ... hello?"

Re: Report: Best Buy tells HP to take back its TouchPads

#25

Post by harold »

I looked at the Touchpad at the local Best Buy. I was interested in buying one, but I was ultimately disappointed after using it for a bit. Unlike the iPad, which looks and feels like it was designed by a few people that might actually want to use it themselves, the TouchPad looks and feels like it was designed by committee.

Re: Report: Best Buy tells HP to take back its TouchPads

#26

Post by danilocampos »

jneal wrote: post #22

I think they should take them back, don't get me wrong, but who's the sales manager for best buy that decided these would be a good buy, and that they could compete with the iPad in price when they can't even come close in quality or performance?

In retail, these folks are called buyers.

Best Buy has plenty of long-term relationships with manufacturers. Any time you see fancy merchandising in the store, say an endcap with fancy graphics pimping the latest Whirlpool front loading washer, it's because the manufacturer has paid for that positioning.

So it's entirely possible that HP made a merchandising deal with Best Buy to promote their new product – and that the terms for the deal included some sort of buy back provision to mitigate the store's risk. Even absent such a provision, HP needs retail distribution channels for their business to work. It's in their interest to keep their partners happy and not leave them holding the bag on an experimental flop of a product.

Re: Report: Best Buy tells HP to take back its TouchPads

#27

Post by commandar »

I think the TouchPad is a cautionary tale that exemplifies something Apple does right:

Don't ship broken hardware.

I have a tech journalist friend who knew I was extremely interested in the TouchPad prior to launch, and let me play with his review unit for a bit. I was ready to drop $500 on one at launch, and walked away crushingly disappointed. The software clearly wasn't ready and with the product launch only a few days off, it was clear that HP was pushing this thing out the door too soon.

Here's the thing - I could tell that the problems were software-related and could be fixed by HP down the road. But HP went from a willing customer with $500 cash in hand, to one that two months later says "eh, maybe I'll pick one up if I catch one of those $350 sales." And I'm sure it's cost them sales since my tl;dr when people ask me about it is "absolutely brilliant interface, awful performance. I wouldn't buy one yet."

If HP had left the TouchPad in the incubator another couple of months and sorted out the performance issues before kicking the thing out the door, the reception would have been very different. I really, really wanted to like the TouchPad, and HP blew it.

You don't get do-overs on first impressions. Apple gets that. If the rest of their competition would figure this out and push out complete products rather than rush them out on an arbitrary time scale, Apple would be a bit less dominant than they are now.

Re: Report: Best Buy tells HP to take back its TouchPads

#28

Post by mgkimsal »

commandar wrote: post #27

I think the TouchPad is a cautionary tale that exemplifies something Apple does right: Don't ship broken hardware. I have a tech journalist friend who knew I was extremely interested in the TouchPad prior to launch, and let me play with his review unit for a bit. I was ready to drop $500 on one at launch, and walked away crushingly disappointed. The software clearly wasn't ready and with the product launch only a few…

Amazingly, webOS/palm got a do-over, in the form of HP buying them.

"We're too small to compete" was the Palm motto towards the end, and HP buying them was seen by the faithful as a way of "getting it right" - more money and resources behind them, they'll be able to really get webOS out there.

And they did the exact same stuff they'd done two years earlier.

Announce and briefly demo a product at start of the year? Check

Delay getting SDK to developers? Check

Ship poor hardware with buggy software to retailers later than anticipated? Check

WHAT THE HELL? The entire webOS unit got a do-over, and still hosed it, with the budget/muscle of one of the largest companies behind it. Of course, that doesn't mean HP actually was really supporting it as much as people expected.

The TouchPad (and webOS stuff in general under HP) seems to have been treated about the same as every other model of HP laptop/desktop rollout they do. Just another SKU on the balance sheet, it'll be on the shelf for a few months, then retired and shifted to overseas support.

Amazingly infuriating to watch company after company claim to want to be a player in the mobile/tablet space, and fail continuously against Apple. It's far less that Apple's doing so much right, but everyone else keeps getting it so wrong, even with successful competitors to copy (this isn't revolutionary groundbreaking stuff any more, launching a tablet).

Re: Report: Best Buy tells HP to take back its TouchPads

#29

Post by Avenger42 »

aaront wrote: post #23
huhtenberg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw TouchPad at BestBuy last night and it was sluggish as hell. I don't really care if it had a patch applied or not. They had exactly one chance to make a great first impression and they failed. We can point finger at whoever, but what I saw pretty much explains why TouchPad did not gather interest with BestBuy buyers .

This is a known issue to HP. It really stinks. The demo units aren't even using 3.0, they're using a special demo build.

I understand the reasoning behind this (make the demos as cool as possible!) but I think you'd run a serious risk of high returns - if you take it home and it doesn't run as well as the one in the store, you're going to mess with it for a few days, get increasingly frustrated and eventually take it back.

Re: Report: Best Buy tells HP to take back its TouchPads

#30

Post by rsynnott »

j_col wrote: post #9
abcd_f wrote: post #4

If tapping an icon on a home screen takes the tablet a fraction of a second just to provide visual feedback for that, I'm sorry, but this is simply not a good tablet. Not anymore, not with iPad in the picture.

If you apply the 3.0.2 patch (an over the air update), it resolves most of the performance issues with webOS on the tablet. Unfortunately all of the online reviews were done using 3.0, so the misconception that webOS on the Touchpad = slow has stuck.

This is why you don't release a broken product hoping to fix it later.
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