And you thought Google buying Motorola Mobility was the biggest story of the week?  Not to be upstaged, HP announced today that they are effectively killing their WebOS devices and are exploring options to sell or spin-off their Personal Systems Group.  This is gigantic news because the Personal Systems Group is the part of HP that makes PCs.  Yes, the world’s largest PC manufacturer (by volume) is now looking to not make PCs anymore.  That alone is a story worthy of serious investigation, but frankly, by other sites. The other aspect of all of this is that HP is now in the position of trying to decide what to do with WebOS. What we know is that HP is not going to be making any more WebOS products and is pulling the Veer, Pre 3 and Touchpad.  WebOS’s fate either lies in enterprise use or through licensing to a third party that doesn’t care about ecosystems.

Less than four weeks ago, we wrote that it may be time to count HP and WebOS out.

That’s it.  It’s done.  WebOS is now dead.   No, don’t be distracted by the reports and the insistence that it’s in fact not dead.  Think somebody is going to license it from HP?  Tack on a year or more for a device to ship.  Think someone is going to buy WebOS and start cranking out killer phones and tablets?  Tack on a year or more for a device to ship.

Yes, we all loved WebOS in our own way.

But it’s time to move on.

If the tidal wave of crowds outside Best Buy and Staples stores this weekend hasn’t tipped you off, the HP Touchpad is on sale for $100 off this weekend.  This discount brings the 16 GB model down to $499 and the 32 GB model down to $599.  As if that wasn’t enough to send the people to the streets, Staples appears to have a $100 coupon available from for the Touchpad that can be used in conjunction with the sales to bring the price down even more.  At $299, the Touchpad is almost a justifiable buy at this point, and HP might manage to actually move some products, something no iPad competitor has been able to do up to this point.

While this is great for most consumers, it is unfortunately the last, final insult to some of the most faithful WebOS users.  You may remember that early this year HP confirmed that previous WebOS phones, the original Pre, Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, would not be receiving an update to WebOS 2.0.  The lack of support for phones that had been on sale so recently struck many as a slap in the face.  If that wasn’t enough, it appears extremely unlikely that Sprint will be receiving the Pre 3 later this summer, meaning that the largest group of WebOS users are further left out in the cold unless they change carriers.

To be fair, HP has to make its business decisions independent of its relatively small user base, but the idea clearly struck some people as wrong, including the WebOS team themselves.  In an interview with Engadget and in a blog post, HP expressed their desire to “make it right” with those early supporters of the platform.  While they never officially confirmed that this was the way they were going to follow through, HP recently gave Pre and Pre Plus owners a $50 mail-in rebate on the 32 GB Touchpad.  That was a fairly weak offering, particularly since it targeted the 32 GB model, but it was something.

What’s also something is the firesale of this weekend.  One month after the Touchpad launch and days after the promised software update, HP is now deep discounting the Touchpad far beyond what their gesture to previous Palm customers offered.  If anything, the $50 rebate may have gotten people off the fence to buy a Touchpad only to find out that they could have had one for substantially less. A 32 GB Touchpad could theoretically sell for $150 less today and the total buy-in cost of going with a 16 GB model would be a whopping $250 less than what Pre owners might have paid for a Touchpad in July.

Again, HP can make whatever decisions they feel are in their best interests, but to pretend that they ever made a real attempt at helping out their most ardent supporters is pretty unbelievable at this point.  This is the wrong way to make things right.

With the launch of the Touchpad having come and gone a year after HP’s purchase of Palm and WebOS, we’re now at a point where it might be fair to assess the current state of WebOS and its future.  HP released the Veer months ago to not so much of a bad reception as a non-reception.  The phone was too small to make any impact whatsoever on the market, leaving everyone to hope that the Touchpad and the Pre 3 would be the breakout devices for WebOS.  Right now, WebOS’s marketshare sits somewhere between 1% and 3% depending on what sources and numbers you use.  Mobilified, like other sites, has been fairly positive about both the quality of WebOS and its future in the mobile space.  Nearing the end of July 2011, however, it may be time to revisit that view.

It’s hard to believe that WebOS has now been in the marketplace for over two years.  To be fair, those two years have been tumultuous and Palm/HP has faced a number of challenges to delivering a competitive product into the marketplace.  The original Pre was lacking in both hardware quality and software refinement.  Palm didn’t move fast enough in iterating its products for it to make any impact before they were bought by HP.  The transition to HP presumably slowed things down, as they managed to only release the Pre 2 (which might as well have been called the Pre Plus Plus) and the disappointing Veer before the launch of the Touchpad.  Now, once again, reviews have been largely negative with a palpable sense of disappointment.  In fact, disappointment seems to be a trend when it comes to WebOS, going back all the way to the beginning.

Consider these reviews of the original Palm Pre, way back in summer 2009:

Jason Chen for Gizmodo:

 The software is agile, smart and capable. The hardware, on the other hand, is a liability. If Palm can get someone else to design and build their hardware—someone who has hands and can feel what a phone is like when physically used, that phone might just be one of the best phones on the market…

…Impressive start to an OS that should form the base of some quality phones in the future

Hardware quality is lacking, and feels flimsy and plasticky compared to the G1, G2 and the iPhone.

Joshua Topolsky, writing for Engadget:

…Generally speaking, the Pre’s UI makes sense and makes it easy to get things done rather quickly and painlessly. It is an impressive beast, though a beast nonetheless — and that means taming will be in order. We saw plenty of little glitches: messages that wouldn’t pop up (or go away), transitions that hung for a bit, and we definitely had a crash or two. In particular, it seems like Palm still needs to work on memory management — we noticed the device getting a little laggy after a day of heavier use, so we’re thinking not every process is being killed completely.

Keeping us hopeful about these issues is the way in which Palm plans to address them. According to the company, updates for the phone will be made OTA as necessary, which means they’ll be able to put out fires quickly, and respond to customer needs with greater agility than a lot of their competition. We have a feeling we’ll see a handful of fixes just after launch based on our conversations….

…There’s also no guarantee of developer support with this phone. As we mention earlier, Palm needs to stoke those fires or the Pre will quickly be cemented as a tiny island in a large sea. We think the platform looks very promising, but with no big push (yet) to put a great SDK into dev’s hands, and no existing user base for those apps, it’s hard to feel assurance that the software will come.

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Lost in the list of HP WebOS product announcements yesterday was the barely-newsworthy announcement that HP was bringing the Pre 2 to Verizon.  While we were fairly positive about elements of the Pre 2 in our own review, we were pretty adamant in our position that the Pre 2 is not a phone worthy of consideration in the smartphone market of 2011.  The original launch of the Pre 2 last fall included the curious announcement that it would come to Verizon soon.  It seemed odd that Verizon would carry the Pre 2 at all, but as time went on a number of people just assumed those plans were dead.  They’re not. They’re very much alive in a terrifyingly zombie-like fashion.

It turns out that the Pre 2 is now available for pre-order and will start shipping on Feb. 17.  Neither HP nor Verizon seem terribly concerned that the Pre 2 hardware is embarrassingly dated or that the Pre Plus (nearly the same phone) didn’t sell well last year.  They also don’t seem bothered by the fact that the Pre 3 is slated for a release this summer, possibly just 4 or 5 months away.  They apparently made a deal and darn it, they’re going to follow through!

Now imagine anyone who doesn’t read PreCentral on a regular basis walks into a Verizon store.  They see the Pre 2 occupying the same long-neglected spot on the wall where the Pre Plus sat the last time they were in there.  They immediately forget glancing in that direction, though, as they’re already captivated by the iPhone 4 or a super-sized Android phone.  They then buy one of those real phones and move on with their lives.  Is anyone going to buy the Pre 2?  If they do, how completely screwed over will they feel if in the summer they see that the Pre 3 is available with much better performance and a more usable, larger screen?

There is no way that the sales of the Pre 2 will be able to make up for a loss of consumer confidence, wrought from either buyer’s remorse or brand dismissal.  By this summer, will anyone on Verizon be willing to give HP and WebOS a shot?

HP finally had it’s big WebOS event today.  I do mean big because it showcased a number of products and lasted over two hours.  As predicted here on Mobilified, HP introduced a tablet and two smartphones. Their (first) WebOS tablet is named the TouchPad and their two new phones are the Pre 3 and the Veer, respectively.  The Pre 3 is very much a larger, faster sucessor to the Pre and the Pre 2, while the Veer carries on the legacy of the Pixi as a tiny phone, though with its new portrait-slider orientation it is more of a miniature Pre.  HP also spoke about the future of WebOS and how it fits into their overall corporate strategy.  This strategy apparently includes putting WebOS on printers and even PC’s.  HP has already posted the video of the event here.

It seems clear that the bulk of the time and effort went into developing the Touchpad.  Since the introduction of both WebOS and Apple’s iPad, it was incredibly obvious that WebOS would scale beautifully to a tablet.  It wasn’t just pundits making the case either, since RIM decided to essentially steal the interface for their upcoming Blackberry Playbook.  There isn’t a ton that can be said about the Touchpad, though, because the experience is almost exactly as one might have imagined on a larger screen.  If you’re familiar with WebOS, or read our review of the Pre 2 and WebOS 2.0, then you know what the basic operation of this device is.

On the TouchPad, HP made some very smart decisions.  For starters, they are using a screen with the same 1024 x 768 resolution as the iPad.  Rather than a move to copy Apple, this was a choice to help their platform, since they will be able to leverage their Plug-in Developer Kit that makes it easy for developers to port apps from iOS to WebOS.  On the Pre, this PDK resulted in a disproportionately high number of quality WebOS games.  While there is more to a platform than just games, there’s no question that games are an important part of the iPad’s appeal.  Copying the screen resolution is just the first part of a larger strategy to convince developers to put in the little extra time to bring their apps to WebOS. Individual apps and notifications are redesigned and rethought for the Touchpad, showing that HP put more thought into its design than to throw a phone OS onto the tablet (see: Samsung Galaxy Tab).

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Next Monday, Mobile World Congress kicks off, providing a platform for the biggest names and players in mobile.  We already know that HTC and Samsung purposely held back upcoming products at CES, hoping to use MWC as their primary stage for introducing their next generation of smartphones.  HTC will likely introduce rather iterative upgrades to their Desire, Desire HD, and Wildfire lines.  They might even have a tablet to show off.  Samsung is expected to introduce their Galaxy S successors with Super AMOLED Plus screens, Tegra 2 or Orion chipsets, and all the TouchWiz you can handle.  What won’t be too surprising, though, is the possibility that any news coming out of the conference will be overshadowed by announcements taking place in the next two days.

At 1:00 PM EST tomorrow, HP will hold its long-awaited WebOS event where everyone will be holding their breath, hoping that the fruits of their purchase of Palm hasn’t gone rotten.  They will certainly introduce a WebOS tablet, at least one phone, and will also outline where they plan on taking the WebOS platform. With all of HP’s money and technical services, there is major potential for them to take WebOS and truly make it the cloud-centric mobile OS that it was designed to be.  While Google appears to be stumbling while trying to articulate why anyone should buy an Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablet, HP may introduce the first viable iPad competitor with a compelling story and use case.  In such an unsure market, they may fail to capture the public’s interest, but this may be one case where they don’t fail to deliver a promising consumer product.  Also note that I’m referring to HP, and only HP, as I expect the Palm name to be flicked away like a WebOS card that’s served its purpose.

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Engadget has certainly had a great run of exclusives lately, and this first leak of the HP/Palm tablet is no exception. According to Engadget, this leak comes from a trusted source and is of a 9″ tablet named or codenamed “Topaz.” Engadget says that a 7″ tablet, named “Opal,” is also in the works and may hit the market later. Other than having a 1.2 Ghz processor, a front-facing camera, and a Micro-USB port, not much else is known about the device, but we’re sure to know something after Feb. 9. Of course, that doesn’t mean speculation can’t run rampant.

For instance, note that the branding on the back has both of the HP and Palm names. In their invite to the Feb.9 event, HP didn’t put the Palm name anywhere. Secrecy couldn’t have been the issue, since they said directly that it would be a WebOS event. The two images are both obviously renders, but the back displays FCC markings, so perhaps that’s what it will actually look like.

And does it ever look good! The front display shows an attractive WebOS that looks pretty inviting to use. After we expressed our disappointment at the small display on the Palm Pre 2, it actually looks as if WebOS has some serious room to breath and roam free! The way the cards and dock look and fit seems very right. In fact, it almost looks too good. While I do think this will be what the tablet looks like, I’m not sold on the back. For one thing, there is no visible name of the device. HP could have kept the name from making it onto early renders, but it seems like it would fit well between the branding and the FCC markings. If that’s the case, who knows what else could be different, including the fairly boring molded plastic and curved back. I expect the back to change and accomodate the name of the device. It’s also very possible that the Palm name will be gone by the time the device hits.

One thing that shouldn’t change is the placement of the quick action bar. They moved the search box below the dock, a welcome move that consolidates most of the navigation of the device at the bottom. It’s difficult to tell if the icons on the right of the screen are notifications or part of the menu system. If they used the extra screen real estate to move the menu option to the bottom, sharing the same vertical space as search, that would be a smart move. They’re probably just notifications, but moving the menu would have been another element they could have consolidated. As long as the device can differentiate between the dock, the search bar, notifications and the gesture area, it’s a pretty clean interface for the device. Here’s hoping that HP also has some phones to back up the powerful initiative reflected in this tablet.

“Think big.  Think small.  Think beyond,” says HP in this announcement that went out to media a few days ago touting an “exciting WebOS announcement.”  Everyone, of course, is busy parsing the messsage to get any kind of clue about what it could be teasing.  Given that we know HP intends to release a tablet running WebOS in the next year, “think big” is obviously referring to that.  But “think small?”  ”Think beyond?”

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Last week, we received a Palm Pre 2 developer phone from HP.  Reviews of the Pre 2 and HP WebOS 2.0 have rolled out slowly across the interwebs, mainly because Palm has only released the device on a few carriers worldwide.  For most customers in the U.S., the bigger story is what HP WebOS 2.0 will bring to whatever existing Palm phones are still in use.  Verizon was announced as a carrier for the Pre 2 sometime in 2010, but that date is has obviously slipped, and you have to wonder if there’s any point in carrying the device anymore.  The reason is not because it’s a bad phone, but because it is an outdated design that is sure to be replaced sometime soon in early 2011.  Palm (we’ll just consider that the current brand name) isn’t likely to debut anything at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, but they are clearly working on shipping a WebOS tablet and a new set of phones in the coming year.  If Verizon doesn’t get a CDMA version on shelves soon, it’s going to be faced with selling a device that many hope will look weak in comparison to whatever Palm expects to release.

So what is the Pre 2?  By most accounts, this is likely a phone that was in the product pipeline before HP bought Palm last year.  It is little more than a slightly-improved Palm Pre, and is probably what Palm should have put out as the Palm Pre Plus in 2010.  The main improvements from the Pre Plus are a flat (as opposed to rounded), glass screen, a faster 1Ghz processor, some slightly improved mechanics in the slider and keyboard, a better camera, 16 GB of internal storage, and a soft-touch material wrapping around the phone.  Other than that, it is the same phone as the original Pre with the same woefully small, low-resolution screen and overall sub-par build quality.  With the updates, this would have been a great phone when it was announced in January 2009 and released that summer.  In December of 2010, it almost seems like a joke.

So why did HP bother to put out this phone?   With its design finished, it was the only phone they could put in developers’ hands at this time.  With Palm’s market share dwindling close to zero, they needed something with modern specs to give to developers.  You have to wonder why they bothered to do any deals with carriers, though, since they are clearly positioning the phone as a developer device, offering it on their website unlocked and with a significant discount for developers.  It’s undoubtedly serving as a showcase for WebOS 2.0 and something on which developers can test their apps if they have faith that there will be real competitive phones coming in the next year.

The real message, then, is that this is all about WebOS going forward.  HP made it clear when they bought Palm that they were primarily interested in the software platform.  We know they are committed to owning their own tablet platform, but their commitment to smartphones themselves remains unclear.  Unfortunately, the Pre 2 does very little to show off their new OS because it is so hampered by hardware issues.  With any luck, developers can get past that, because it certainly feels like WebOS could come alive on all kinds of larger screens.  Until it does, however, we can only evaluate it on the phones available to us.

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With HP Palm finally doing something with WebOS, Windows Phone 7 showing off a stylish design, and Google close to announcing Gingerbread, the next version of Android, it only makes sense to casually think about the design that goes into these platforms and the people responsible for them.  Of course, Apple has Steve Jobs, Scott Forstall and a small team that works on UI elements of IOS.  Microsoft has had a larger team of engineers working on Windows Phone 7, but most of the Metro interface design was set in place prior to the release of the Zune HD.  That leaves us with Palm’s HP WebOS and Google’s Android, two platforms that could end up being more closely related than anyone could have thought even just a few years ago.  The key player in this relationship is Matias Duarte, the former Senior Director of User Interface at Palm.  In May of this year, Duarte was hired away from Palm to join Google as the User Experience Director for Android.  This was a relatively small story at the time, but one that could have giant implications in the competition for smartphone supremacy if, and this is a big if, the relationship works out.

For those who don’t know, Duarte first made his mark at Danger as the leader of the team that created the Danger Hiptop, which would later be re-branded and known as the T-Mobile Sidekick.  Of course, the co-founder of Danger was Andy Rubin, who went on to found Android and still operates at Google as a VP of Engineering, primarily overseeing Android.  Rubin undoubtedly took note as Duarte crafted the immensely-popular Sidekick and followed that work up with the design of Palm’s WebOS.  At CES in 2009, it was Duarte who was guiding the audience through most of the demos of WebOS, not Palm’s Jon Rubinstein.  Two innovative and refined projects didn’t just happen by luck for Duarte, who is known in the industry for being very particular and demanding in his pursuit of a clean experience.  It’s no surprise, then, that we have yet to see a mobile operating system with the polish of WebOS outside of the iPhone or the impending release of Windows Phone 7.  That attention to detail is undoubtedly what Rubin wanted to acquire in hiring Duarte, but it also may prove to be the major hurdle integrating that vision with the user experience of Android.

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For having put so few products of real relevance into the marketplace recently, Palm and the newly-branded HP WebOS have garnered tons of attention.  Some people in technology journalism may have a soft spot for the company that at one time owned the PDA and smartphone market, but the attention is well-deserved in light of how modern the OS itself feels.  The cards interface really does feel more like “real” multitasking.  Palm has let everyone down by failing to make the small improvements that matter or putting WebOS onto competitive hardware, but it’s too late to proclaim WebOS dead, especially given the push HP is expected to make.

With the introduction of the Palm Pre 2 and WebOS 2.0 this week, HP is apparently pushing out the remaining development of its platform that was uniquely Palm before the HP purchase.  The Pre 2 is nothing more than an update to an existing product that should have come out months ago.  Friday’s launch on French carrier SFR, and the subsequent rumored launch on Verizon and other carriers is likely to have very little impact.  Even though the build quality of the Pre 2 is superior to its predecessor, the phone is still clearly outmatched next to the latest generation of iPhone, Android, and now even Windows Phone 7 phones.  Most observers believe that HP will finally go ahead with its hardware roadmap sometime this next year, and today’s rumor of 5-6 Palm devices contracted form Foxconn and Compal would seem to bolster that theory.  One thing is without question, though: if HP is going to have any chance of making Palm relevant in the smartphone market, they will need to put out that hardware as soon as possible to combat any more growth from Apple, Google, or Microsoft.

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