321–330 of 517 posts
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Were they used to be great? I definitely remembered HP having a very bad reputation even back then. Like every time a ridiculous printer feature that costs user’s money it was HP.
Think back to 1980. (which may well be before you were born). I'm not sure when they started sliding back, but I'd put the start somewhere around 2000.
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Were they used to be great? I definitely remembered HP having a very bad reputation even back then. Like every time a ridiculous printer feature that costs user’s money it was HP.
You would hardly believe they once made top of the line voltmeters, oscilloscopes, atomic clocks, calculators - even their printers were once the best.
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WebOS LG TV owner, and TouchPad owner here. As far as I can tell, there's nothing obviously connected to the UI experience of the TV and the TouchPad. The TV is a lot more locked down and filled with ads, but still snappy. Sideloading IPK's is limited. I would love to neuter all the ads and auto-updates, that's my main gripe.
> but still snappy It's about the least snappy thing I've ever used, apart from cheap Android tablets (we made the mistake of buying an Amazon Fire Kids tablet which is the only device I've ever used that was literally unusably slow). I even bought the higher spec version of the TV because apparently the cheaper version is even slower. Great image quality but I'll definitely never buy another LG TV again.
As far as the TV, here's my model number:
OLED77C2AUA
No complaints about performance ever from me or my wife. Just the ads and software/features I don't care about. (No I do not want to update... Stop asking, I have auto-update disabled for a reason)
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The Nokia N900, running Maemo, also supported multitasking in 2011. It was just toppled by a similarly dedicated team of executive fuckups.
To be honest there were a lot of mobile OSes at the time supporting multitasking, like Windows CE, because they were desktop OS (Linux for Maemo, Windows for CE) with little adaptation for mobile. That meant performances and battery life were not great. That's why those OS were mostly used by geeks and power users, and "regular" users were using feature phones that "just work". One of the strength of iOS and Android…
Despite that, the phone sold several million devices and people were paying huge premiums (often $200-400 over price) to get it shipped from these secondary markets to where they lived.
The demand was there and Elop decided to kill it anyway. He also never released the second phone required by their Meego contract with Intel as I recall.
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I was working at HP during that time. They sent a company wide email asking people to develop applications for the OS, and receive a Palm Pre for free. I created an app that simply turns off the screen, and called it a mirror app (because you could see your reflection). I really enjoyed my free Palm Pre. I tried resurrecting it a few years ago but couldn’t find a replacement battery after the original died.
Although amusing, I hoped you would share more insight to the situation.
I was the “webmaster” specialist at that time, and hearing the news that HP bought palmOS which was based on JavaScript made me really excited.
However, during that time, HP was notorious for replacing its CEO on a yearly basis.
After 1 year working on our project, 30 person team, the CEO was replaced and our project was scrapped.
They gave me 2 months to do nothing (actually played gears of war in the game room), and then moved me to another team where we spent 8 months waiting while the managers argued on what we should be doing . After that I quit.
We always knew that the software side of hp provides barely 10% of the revenue while the rest is printers.
It really wasn’t a surprise they failed with the Palm purchase.
If you compare what HP did here to what Nokia did with Maemo and its Nokia Tablets the board here 100% made the right call. The tablet market just isn't large enough for an app ecosystem independent of the two major phone platforms. Nokia did what the author is suggesting HP should have done and it doesn't exist anymore. Going independent of the major platforms was a dead end. HP did well to kill it early. Anyone who…
It absolutely could have been a huge success if Elop hadn't gone out of his way to kill it.
Sounds like a great Silicon Valley episode plot.
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Hey. I wrote some of that trash. I think this is a bad take because I don’t think the core issue of the platform was that it was based on web tech. The web tech basically worked fine. However the bugginess and challenging user interface (which is actually standard today) was a huge issue. The leadership decision that was needed wasn’t to kill the touchpad 49 days after launch, it was to kill it before launch. Palm wa…
webOS really needed low-level help. It took over forever to boot because (seemingly) nobody ever bothered to optimize even the low-hanging fruit. The webkit version used was slow and way behind standards and (as was the JS JIT). This was crippling for a web-first system. That aside, the actual UX of webOS itself is still better than anything we have today and I liked my Touchpad despite the flaws.
- Kernel talent was never a problem at Palm. The ex-Palm folks lead or are technical leaders at many mainstream unix-ish OSes today, plus Fuschia (Android, Apple, Chrome, Fuschia)
- Boot times weren't the highest priority (though we did spend time on it since they were _so bad_). Battery life was. We didn't even do that well by launch date, but if Android hadn't mainlined their power-management framework before the Pre launched it would have been a joke. It was all hands on deck to get that stuff integrated in time for launch.
- The webOS platform was actually a thin UI layer on top of an Android-like Java-based platform that never launched. The Java-based OS wasn't derivative of Android (it predated Android), but it had no differentiating features with Android already live. Booting the Java runtime _and_ the JS engine and webkit was a lot.
- We knew we couldn't have Java running on this phone long-term, so tons of effort was going into nascent node services instead of Java ones. So all those were launching too.
- Your memory is incorrect on the JS jit, or mine is. My memory is that we were adopting the latest v8 engines as fast as they would come out (although not as fast as chrome) because they were the only ones that could keep the thing performant.
- Webkit was a mess, I'll give you that, but I'm surprised you noticed. Were you at palm too? Did you build apps? We generally provided UI components that were the way to build apps that, hopefully, allowed you to ignore the intricacies of exactly which webkit version you were on (at least to build an app).
> "Then, in late June 2011 […] I faced a medical emergency requiring immediate surgery and a eight-week recovery period confined to bed. […] On July 1, 2011, HP launched the TouchPad tablet running WebOS 3.0 […] The launch was botched from the start. HP priced the TouchPad at $499 to compete directly with the iPad, but without the app ecosystem or marketing muscle to justify that premium. The device felt rushed to ma…