I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

Post by wpm » Sun, Jun 15, 2025, 6:36 PM UTC

bradfa wrote: post #395

jeroenhd wrote: post #262

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I have good experience with HP laptops. Not their 200 euro consumer trash (but honestly, anything marketed towards consumers is trash these days, from any vendor), but HP's ProBook and Zenbook line. Probook is more plastic fantastic, but the repairability was great. Zenbook got hot, but always remained quiet (until the Nvidia GPU kicked in, but that's on Nvidia). Driver support and UEFI update support were both excel…

I have an HP ENVY laptop that’s very nice. Amazingly good screen, takes SODIMM and M.2 NVMe, flips around as a 2-in-1, and is quite thin and light for a 15” laptop. But omfg the HP website and product lineup are impossible to use and figure out! Dell does it better but is still too complex. Why are there so many product lines? How does a normal person figure out what to buy? HP has excellent engineering but horrible…

Post by ndiddy » Sun, Jun 15, 2025, 9:00 PM UTC

guenthert wrote: post #510

ndiddy wrote: post #308

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I remember reading an article about the development of the Touchpad. Apotheker wanted the Palm division to be cash neutral. This meant that when they were speccing out the Touchpad, they weren't able to get any of the parts they wanted because Apple kept buying out supplier capacity for the iPad 2 and HP wasn't willing to cough up the money for the suppliers to expand their capacity. I think the engineer described th…

The build quality wasn't the issue (as far as I can tell). I bought a unit on the secondary market more than a year after the "Fire Sale", it was flawless. It's hardware spec, particularly those obvious to end-users, like weight and thickness matched however the original iPad, not the iPad 2 (promoted for being "thinner") already released by the time of the launch of the TouchPad. That combined with the lack in avail…

Post by klank » Tue, Jun 24, 2025, 6:26 AM UTC

anonymars wrote: post #479

klank wrote: post #176

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Glad to hear this sentiment, even all these years later. We got there finally, we really did. But oh my, was it a journey. The effort (and investment ms put in) moving mobile computing/devices forward during that time is (IMO) an under song but major part of the work required to get to the modern day cell phone/embedded device. (I worked at ms starting during ppc/tpc era through wm)

I always say that many of the things we take for granted today came from Windows Phone At the time everything was app-based: you are looking at a photo and want to share it? Why, of course you should switch over to the messaging app in question and start a new message and attach it. As opposed to "share the picture, right now, from the photos app" Dedicated access to the camera no matter what you were in the middle o…

Post by onli » Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 9:39 AM UTC

rldjbpin wrote: post #516

onli wrote: post #131

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The devices sold like hot cake after the price cut. The failure he has to refer to was cancelling WebOS completely, instead of giving it another go. The right decision would have been to price cut the existing devices, provide fixes for the existing issues (there were small usability issues like the web browser reloading after inactivity, which means reloading when you got stuck for a long page download) and meanwhil…

as someone who still remembers the hype around the deal, most people bought the tabs to "jailbreak" and install another OS into it (ubuntu touch?). perhaps i misremember things but neither os had a great tablet experience.