The Curious Case of the HP TouchPad

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You can't wait to hear from you. Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone, Welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Poulett. I am an editor at how stuff Works dot com. And sitting down across from me because he just doesn't want to stand, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Sometimes when we touch, the honesty's too much and I

have to close my eyes and hide. That typically has nothing to do with the electronics and computer industry, but today we're talking about a very weird situation, the the HP touch pad and its fate and uh and reaction to that fate and what that reaction to that fate might actually mean and how it could change the fate. And I got a headache. Yeah. So a few podcasts ago, and I don't even remember which one it was on because I didn't think about it until just now to

look it up. Um, we talked about web OS and in terms of and it was a tablet And I said, you know what, I actually have finally had the chance to mess around with an HP touch pad. Um And it was the first time I had ever actually encountered the web os in the wild. Um, I think there was an elephant standing nearby. It was a little scary, an elephant in my pajamas. How I got on my touch pad I'll never know, but uh, but yeah, it was the first time I had actually ever had the

opportunity to tried. I never actually seen a Palm pre or anything, you know, anything else that ran it. And I really liked the OS and I didn't spend hours with it. I spent about five minutes with it, but I thought, hey, you know what this is. This is pretty nice. And I used Android on my phone and I use you know iOS, I've got an iPad. I thought, well, this this is a pretty nice o S. I really like it. I would like to mess with it some more.

And I thought, maybe HP has got something with this thing. Except HP didn't think so. Um. Well, before we before we jumped too much into the actual story, we probably should revisit. We did an episode on Palm which is where you were thinking of the web os. We did an episode on on the the rise and fall of Palm and kind of it's a pathway and uh. And in a way, what we're talking about now is almost the death of Palm, although there's a glimmer there's a

glimmer of life left in what Palm created. Yeah, in a in a nutshell, Palm, of course was h personal digital assistant company. They made the hardware for UH, for this device, which in the was wildly popular with business people. Um. It was a predecessor to the smartphone, a company where the the company founders left and created another company called Handspring. They came up with the Trio, which was a very

early smartphone. It used. They licensed the Palm operating system from Palm, and eventually Palm acquired hand Spring and started making Trios, and they sort of, you know, gradually started the smartphone market more or less, I would say, along with BlackBerry. Right, BlackBerry was getting a lot of traction in the enterprise field, so all the professionals, right, executives, people like that, were snapping up Blackberries and getting hooked on them. Uh. And then Palm was courting that same

customer base. Uh. Neither Palm nor BlackBerry at the time. We're really making a huge dent in the general consumer market that we didn't see the general consumer get interested in smartphones really until the introduction of the iPhone in two thousand seven. Yep. And the thing is, BlackBerry had the enterprise market sewn up, partially because of their thorough encryption.

They have their their proprietary encryption system and network. UM and iPhone had this brand new operating system, and all of a sudden, Palms operating system which hadn't really been updated significantly. I mean, yeah, I've been gone through periodic updates, but it wasn't uh really new or refreshed. UM started to really show its age. I mean BlackBerry and and an Apple, we're really setting it behind. And it was painfully obvious that Palm was losing ground very very quickly. Right,

So let's flash forward to two thousand nine. January two thousand nine at C E. S. Palm unveils the Palm pre running the brand new web OS. The press went nuts, Oh boy, did they? Yeah? Look at that this was a device that had more buzz around it than just about anything else on the floor that year. There were a couple of other items that also got some some major buzz, but the Palm pre was was way up there, and everyone who saw it thought it looked really snazzy.

That the web operating System or the web OS rather was that it was very um uh snazzy. It had a nice, uh flashy look to it. It looked like it was very responsive. Uh, it looked like it could really give the iPhone a run for its money as far as design is concerned. Because really, I'm a huge Android fan, don't get me wrong, So when I say this, know that I'm saying it as someone who owns Android products and loves the Android system. Android does not have

the flash or style of iOS. It doesn't. It's it's a very useful system, and it has a lot of flexibility and a lot of customization built into it, which is fantastic and that's why I love it. But it doesn't have the kind of snazzy look of iOS or

web os. So the response was, Hey, this is a smartphone that might appeal to the same potential customer as Apple's customers, right, not just like not just smartphone buyers, because some smartphone buyers are like me, you know, they're gonna be I want the Android one because it it kind of caters to my style. Some are going to be I like this one because it's pretty and it works. And uh, and there's nothing wrong with either of those two. By the way, I'm not passing any judgment. I just

happened to fall into that one category versus the other. Now, the webOS the Palm pre like I said, made a huge splash, but there was a problem in that it didn't get to market until June of two thousand nine. So it was it was unveiled in January and then six months passed before it hits store shelves. Yeah, and there's another problem too, and it really hit a long time before this, and that is that Palm did not move early enough to make this work. Not really right.

So by two thousand nine, the iPhone has been out for two years. The Android phone has been out for almost as long. Android launched just a few months after the iPhone became available, and so you already had these companies already had a jump in the smartphone market. We're already building a customer base, and so you're starting to lose the number of people who are interested in smartphones. But don't already have one, and then that means that you have to get whatever group is left, like people

who want a smartphone but haven't bought one. They've held off that that number has gotten very small, or you have to convince people who have bought a smartphone to switch, which is tough because most of the time, at least in the United States, those smartphones are coming with contracts that last at least two years, and to get out

of that contract you have to spend more money. So it means that the purchase price of a new smartphone, you know that part of it, that's the base amount of where you're gonna spend, but you're also going to spend the money to get out of your current contract on top of that, so it makes those smartphones even more expensive. Or you know, if you buy a phone that isn't connected to a plan, that adds money to

the purchase price. So anyway, uh, yeah, Palm was already behind in the game, and then the fact that it took six months from the unveiling to the launch meant that that buzz that was so powerful back in January had died down to just a murmur by June, and so it the Palm pre did not have a hugely successful launch. Uh. They followed it up with the Palm Pixie, which had even worse But anyway, Palm started to suffer

and then the company began to waiver financially. And that's when HP stepped in in two thousand ten and purchased the company. Yeah, they had been sort of, I would say, not so secretly looking for suitors, you know, who wants to pick us up. We got some good stuff and uh an HP was was the winning bidder on the company and picked it up. And people began saying, okay, so is HP going to get in the smartphone business? Now?

What does this mean for the web os? And HP pretty much said definitively they were not interested in the smartphone business. That didn't mean that they were going to completely discontinue all that, but they they the company made it very clear that this purchase was really for webOS more than anything else. And and so people were saying, okay, so if you're not going to make smartphones with it,

what are you going to do with it? And of course, in with the launch of Apple's iPad um, it became clear that there was a market for consumers to buy tablet computers. So the tablet computer race is now on, with Apple firmly in the lead. Uh and HP starts to develop tablets as well. And tablets were not again, not a new thing. Tablets have been around for a while. It's just that iPad was the first one to really become a success in the consumer market, and it was

depending up. I don't want to say it's clear that Microsoft Windows was not a good operating system for tablets. I'll say that a lot of engineers did not like using Windows for tablets. They found it to not be ideal. Plus the form factor for tablets to previous tablets the Microsoft operating system, tablets were primarily essentially notebook computers for which the screen would flip inside out and you could

snap it down. So it was more or less the size and heft of a laptop computer, a smallish laptop computer, but not the same form factor the small size of a of an iPad. Then, yeah, so HP starts working on on actually are they been working but they they're developing the touch pad. That's their their tablet, and the touch pad launched officially on July one, yep, July one, and we're recording this, uh towards the end ish of August,

when we're sitting down in the studio. We know that you guys are listening to this later because you're not in here with us, right. But the thing is, UM. In July they announced, you know, they released these and on August I heard of a story in which Best Buy was saying, these things aren't selling. We want HP to take them back. Uh. It was a rumor because you know, the companies aren't really gonna do that. But basically what happened was they had they had purchased a

lot of inventory, and the inventory wasn't moving. They weren't moving them. Yeah, and they were priced about the same as an iPad, and they were around the same amount as an iPad. And and so you're talking tablets, Yeah, you're talking about the five to eight dollar range, depending upon the tablets. UM. So the touchpads were not really moving.

And then HP dropped a bombshell on the world, uh, in a in a call on August nine, and that was when HP said that the executive said that they were no longer going to support the developing web os products. Now the software will, according to HP, continue to be supported in some way that wasn't really addressed in that

particular discussion. But so there's no immediate indication that webOS itself is really going away, but the HP is no longer going to be building products for web Os, and that means no more smartphones or tablets running the web Os operating system, which is you know, only a few weeks of the tablet being out there, forty nine days to be specific, And in fact, forty nine days means that the HP Touchpad did out pasked one other electronic

device that was famously launched and then abandoned soon thereafter, and that was the Kin from Microsoft sow. The Kin was the the the follow up to the Sidekick. You know, Microsoft purchased danger yes, and then UH decided to introduce the Kin, which was running on on the the Dangerous servers, and that lasted forty eight days from launch to abandonment. So the touchpad survived a day longer than the Ken did.

These were not, by the way, just I don't want to give the indication that both of these stories happened simultaneously. The kN that that happened before the touchpad story. But anyway, Yeah, so this ended up making some waves in technology circles.

People were starting to talk about does this mean that Palm is officially dead now that webbos has essentially been abandoned uh, And then there were other people saying, no, no, no no, let's not jump to conclusions, because, as HP has said, they will continue to support at least the

software side of web os UH. My question is that, UH, is there enough of an incentive for developers to continue developing applications for web os knowing that there are no plans for any future hardware that will run the operating system, at least not any from HP. I mean, there's always the possibility that HP could license out operating system to some other hardware manufacturer, right right, so we might see some other branded UH device come out with the web

Os on it. Yeah. Now let's pretend, for for for just a moment, that the story stops right here. UM, I think the podcast would pretty much stop right here, because I think, UH, speaking for myself anyway, I would say it's unlikely that HP is going to do anything with it. It's unlikely, considering the difficulty with which Palm UH fund itself trying to be purchased, that anybody will want to pick it up. So I would say that this is the death of the web os. That's if

the story stops here. But weirdly enough, so it doesn't. The touch pad became the most popular obsolete device I have ever heard of. It's it's very strange. Now, it's well, it's that's completely strange. But well, so we have we've we've already uh, you know, touched on the fact that there are tons and tons of them out there right

they're not selling. Um. Yeah, the article I had, um I read about was Eric Hesseldahl from All Things d who who he was going on rumors that Best Buy had bought two hundred seventy thousand touch pads and it only moved twenty five thousand of them. She actually mentioned, well, I mean you talked about the discounts. There was a discount for fifty dollars and then a hundred dollars on on the touch pad that ended up being a permanent discount.

After they still weren't selling. They said there was a deal on woot dot com for a hundred twenty dollars off the sixteen gigabyte model six D twelve. People went in for it. It's not really a lot of people showing interest in it. Again, no one's gonna pick it up. They've killed it off. It's not except at this point, with all these touch pads in the marketplace, HP and all these retailers decided to put it on a steep discount.

So there are two models, the sixteen and the thirty two gigabyte, and they started going for as low as ninety nine dollars. Yeah, and and include there was one place where you could get it for forty because here's Staples, Staples, Staples, because Staples was running a promotion, whereas fifty dollars off a tablet for the back to school promotion. So if you bought the nine dollar sixteen gigabyte touch pad from stay Poles, you would get the fifty dollars back. It

was a forty nine dollar tablet. If I had seen that, I same here. Okay, I do not own a touch pad, Chris, you do not own a touch pad, but both of us at a hundred dollars. That's this is This is where the story really gets interesting because it could mean huge changes coming up in the tablet market going forward, because people have taken notice when HP reduced the prices for the sixteen gigabyte down to and the thirty two gigabyte was down to a hundred and forty nine dollars.

People started sweeping them up. People were buying them in bunches, because you could buy five sixteen gigabyte touch bad tablets for the same price as and iPad. Yeah, and they've started showing up on eBay for more than that for yeah, some in some cases more than what the retail price was when they were in stores. But the that was the the interesting thing was that people started jumping on these deals, and in fact HP was soon out of stock, although of course lots of other type pads are still

on their way back to HP. So by the time this podcast goes live, I can't say for sure that there will be more sales because I don't know the numbers, but I do know that between the time we're recording and then there probably will be another sale on HP, and and that HP even invited people to sign up for notifications when it would go on sale again. Yeah.

And and the thing is to HP has said we're temporarily out of stock, we will be getting more of them, right, and and there are all the other places that we're selling them for the nine dollars. Very quickly sold out, and there were websites dedicated just to tracking these deals and letting people know when the deals were active and then when the deals had had expired, like when all

the inventory was sold out. And I was watching these for a while because I was thinking, you know what, maybe I'll pick one up because a hundred dollars, that's that's tempting. Um. And even though knowing that the web os operating system may be obsolete, you know, there may not be that much more developed before that operates istem just because again, if you're a developer and you're going to spend the time, money, and effort to build something,

you want to hit. Uh. You want to build an application it's going to as many people as possible, and you don't do it for an operating system that's obsolete, right, one would guess. But because these sales have gone so crazy all over the place, now there's a renewed interest, at least in the journalism sphere, of where could webbos go after this, because it's shown that people are willing to buy this product at this price. Uh, Now it may not go anywhere for webOS. Well, it is important

to note, um. I read in the Christian Science Monitor an article by Chris Gaylord who pointed out that apparently the parts cost for a touch pad. Actually he quoted I supply, um, the parts inside a touch pad cost about three six dollars. So if you're wondering if HP is gonna go, huh, well, we can sell these, but we're gonna have to deeply discount them. They're gonna have to if they want to make a profit on it. And they would make a profit on the hardware, not

on the software. You know, other other companies can do that, you know, people like Sony with the PlayStation. They're gonna make some money on the games. HP is not really going to make money on the software side, so they would have to price it above three d seven dollars. I'm sounding like the prices right one dollar? Um, so yeah, a hundred dollars. They're not going to make any money on it. But the thing is now there is an entrenched base of users sort of. I mean there there

weren't people before. Now there is an incentive to develop software for the web os because there are a lot of people now, not not as many as with the iPad or with the Android tablets. But there are people using the web os. The question is is it worth catering to that audience or is it worth just exploring options of catering to the Apple and Android audiences, which are, like you said, much larger. Um, I think and and not.

And to complicate that a little more, I know that there are people furiously working on ways to uh to essentially white webOS off the tablet and replace it with Android. Um, I've I've seen, I know, I've seen reports about early Gingerbread builds, Gingerbread being that the in the smart No, no, that's Honeycomb. Gingerbread is the old smart Point. There's the

smartphone operating system. Yeah, and there's plans of incorporating the Honeycomb operating system, assuming that you know, the hardware can can run it properly and all this kind of stuff. By the time, by the time this podcast goes live, there may very well be a Honeycomb build specifically geared so that you know, you can replace your webOS with

Honeycomb if you wanted to. So there's that problem, because you know, there might be developers saying, yeah, they're all these there are all these tablets that are out there, but there's a certain percentage of tablet owners who don't even want that web os in the first place, So why would I develop for it? Then? But beyond that,

this shows that there is a demand for tablets. Uh. There are a lot of people who want a tablet, but who are not willing to pay the prices that you find on your your average tablet on the marketplace. And they want a tablet that's of a certain quality, meaning better than some of the low end tablets that you find on the market uh, but they don't want

to pay the premium price for it. And when I say premium price, I'm talking about from their perspective, the consumer perspective, not necessarily the manufacturer perspective, which, depending upon the manufacturer may have spent quite a bit of money. There may be a very low margin on some of

those tablets. Um. So it could mean that perhaps tablet manufacturers say, why don't we look at a way to build a tablet that's going to cost less to for the consumer but still deliver a satisfying experience so that people don't feel like they've bought an inferior product. Um. And I think I think that's you know, the scramble where you just see this incredible passion for a product

that is pretty much obsolete right now. UM. That that does that that raises some eyebrows, That that gets attention. You know, they're going to be some companies out there that are gonna say, you know, if this is the kind of excitement we see, we need to find the best price point for a tablet and then figure out the most economical way to produce a tablet for that price point where we can make a profit. Yeah. I

think that's going to be the larger question. I don't think HP will get in back into the tablet business and turn it around and go, oh, you know what, people really do want this. Um. I. I wouldn't be surprised though, to see web os come back in some form, And by that I don't necessarily mean that HP will do it. UM. I wouldn't be surprised to find that somebody else wants at least the technology for use in

their products. UM. But I also, you know, I was on a website, one of the tech websites that I sadly I can't remember, had a poll about what we thought should happen, and most people who answered that poll, non scientific, thought that it should be open sourced. So you know, there there could be a lot of things that happened to the operating system, and it could end

up in other locations. But I wouldn't be surprised two sometime down the road, I don't think this is these questions about HP and the web os specifically are going to be coming in the next few weeks. I think this is going to be one of those things that plays out over some time. But I think it does show some interest in the possibility of of using the web os. I think it's it's absolutely a viable product.

Question is who's willing, you know, whether HP is willing to let it go or sell somebody else or make a contribution to the open source community and say you know what, guys, here it is go to it. Yeah, I mean it's gonna this is gonna be one of those wait and see situations really on multiple fronts. What's the future of webbs was what is the future of low end tablets? Uh? Like, what does this say about the market in general? Um? But I didn't think we'd

even be having this conversation. No, No No, it was just it was August. Normally, for those of you who are unfamiliar with tech news, you normally it's a very slow month, and it started out slow this year, but some things, some things have shaken things up. Um, the HP touchpad was one of the first big stories that really shook things up. There was an earthquake on the East Coast and then the response to that through various social networks.

That was a big story. And that was even that an earthquake on the East Coast where it was felt from Virginia all the way up to New York City. That would you would think that would be the biggest story of the week. But then there was a story that broke that was even large than that. And depending on when this podcast goes live, you may or may

not have already heard our podcast about that. And of course we're referring to Steve Jobs resigning from Apple and we're going to do a podcast on that, or maybe we've already done a podcast on that. I don't know, because I don't know what the schedule will be. On the other hand, we you didn't mention Google and motoral mobility. Oh yeah, another huge story Google. Yeah, it's a very odd August. I think maybe they figured everyone was on

vacation and we should make our big moves now. Um yeah, that that's and we'll have to do a story about that too. So anyway, guys, that that's the kind of our our take on the touchpad situation and what happened and what might happen. Uh, It's it's really all up in the air, and it's kind of an interesting if any of you guys rushed out and bought a touch pad and took advantage of one of those deals. Just

let us know what you think. Let's know about Well, let first of all, let's know about how what the experience was like purchasing it, and then let us know what you think about the actual tablet. Are you going to keep the web os? Do you like it? What do you what do you think is the best part, What do you think needs more work? Or do you plan on actually using the tablet and replacing the operating

system at some point? I want to know all those things. Yeah, some people did report problems trying to get their hands on one because some outlets uh went back on the deal. They said, oh sorry, we don't have a supply these after all. Sorry, after they had already made a purchase, so they got emails, named went to social media and complained bitterly out loud to the to the planet. I think that was really a case of lots of people flooding the system so quickly that it couldn't keep pace

with the inventory. So, in other words, in other words, that it's not that the company was doing this in bad faith, it's just that literally the demand outstripped the supply and the capacity to to monitor how many units were being sold at any given time. And of course, like I said, you know, a lot of those places shipped their units back to HP, which we do expect to sell uh the rest at a hopefully at the same price, although that remains to be seen as of

the recording of this podcast. But anyway, if you guys have bought one less no tell us what you think and you can email us. Our address is tech stuffs at how stuff Works dot com, or let us know on Facebook and Twitter. You'll find us there as text Stuff H s W and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. Keep in touch. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join How Stuff Work staff as we explore the most

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