I'm astonished that they aren't even going to bother selling it off. With the Google/Motorola merger, surely one of the Android partners has to be feeling a little uncomfortable right now. Hell, Motorola was always rumored to be working on its own JS-based OS because it didn't like the position of relying only on Android.
Who would buy it? HTC or Samsung? Nokia? The OEMs are worse at making OSes and dev ecosystems than even HP which has experience making a UNIX based OS. And it's not as if buying WebOS will stop the patent attacks, in fact, it may increase them. They would simply be better off with Android/Windows 8 for tablets
As Nokia's CEO said, it's a battle of ecosystems now, not devices anymore. Maybe RIM's next, either for a takeover, or a failure.
An unnamed source claimed something that the article itself says there's a bunch of problems with this idea and we are supposed to believe it? It was more likely a rumour that someone at Palm was putting around to try and push the price up, and the "source" believed it.
As a whole, I don't see much value. Why would anyone be interested in purchasing a failed-to-launch tablet product when Android tablets sell well and the software is free (outside of patent deals with trolls)? The distinction of having your own software didn't work for HP, so why should it work for Samsung/HTC/etc?
However! I think the big sale is yet to come. When HP bought Palm, they acquired their 1,600-ish patents as well. Palm was a very early player in the smartphone market, so it's conceivable that this portfolio contains some attractive property. Having paid $1.2 billion for Palm, either selling this patent portfolio outright, or taking the Lodsys route seems plausible. Given the heat around patent acquisition right now, they'd probably do pretty well; maybe even exceeding their original purchase price.
Yes. Palm patents have the potential of creating another Nortel type situation. That is possibly a part of "optimization of webOS revenue". Would be interesting to see who gets a hold of this pile.
HP already has a hold of this pile. I wouldn't just assume that because they're exiting the hardware business they have no (future) need for that portfolio. Heck, if anything, they'll have to hold on to those if they hope to license webOS to other handset makers (the latest rumor).
It is hard to imagine why they will sit on the Palm portfolio without hardware business considering their new focus is to become IBM/SAP like - enterprisey. IBM for e.g. sold 1000 patents to Google short while ago.
And besides, I am not certain webOS licensing is going to go very far. We will see..
There's definitely a lot of strategy being reviewed inside HP right now. They have a number of options available to them, some of which include licensing the entire platform, or even specific patents. Having paid $1.2bn for Palm, and having observed two large patent portfolios sell for a number that is 10x that, I'd imagine that there is at least some consideration being given to exiting while the market for mobile patents is hot. Licensing is a much longer play, but it's also fraught with the risk of having to enforce the portfolio with litigation, not to mention the threat of patent reform.
"Why would anyone be interested in purchasing a failed-to-launch tablet product when Android tablets sell well and the software is free"
a) webOS is an OS that has been shipped on much more than just this latest tablet. It's a fantastic OS, but has been hampered by poor execution by Palm & HP.
Sell what off? They're keeping WebOS (at least for now) not sure what kind of manufacturing Palm does but its likely small and something that HP could continue to use.
I dont' doubt HP is still going to build Tablets and phones they're just likely going to be Android.
So does Microsoft come a-calling with a bag with a giant $ on it, and suggest coming back to Windows? Does Google dangle Android?
Or does this mean HP is getting out of mobile altogether? If so, that's a huge mistake, given the state of the market right now. Especially if they are spinning off the PC side of things, what's left for HP? Printers?
Agreed! Android is Linux + Java, Chumby is Linux + Flash, webOS is Linux + Webkit ( and iOS is...different). Definitely prefer the webOS option, and there aren't that many other permutations.
Unlike the other options, webOS is composed of two open source projects. What prevents someone from knitting them together, with a little hardware interfacing? Would it be legally problematic to attempt to make an OS that was compatible with the existing webOS apps?
>HP’s wording up above leaves things a bit vague, with at least two potential routes left open: licensing webOS to others
Why would anyone license something that's basically stillborn even with a company as big as HP pushing it? Obvious choices for OEMs seem to be Android or Windows 8.
Sign me up for a $150 Touchpad at the firesale if there is one(resisting temptation to call it the Ouchpad like a headline did).
That's how much I am willing to spend for the latest OS with no future joining the ranks of good-but-dead ones like Amiga and BeOS.
WebOS has always been the most impressive mobile OS IMO, it's just never had a competent owner or decent hardware to back it up. I hope they do something with it.
This, of course, is coming from one of the suckers that paid $599 for a Touchpad on launch day, so take it with a grain of salt.
Coming from one of the suckers who bought a Palm Pre two years ago and is still using it (gotta love contracts!), I see nothing redeeming about WebOS. WebOS was Palm's Potemkin village -- a shallow attempt to convince a larger, dumber company that they were relevant enough to warrant a buyout, by creating the appearance of a technically impressive achievement.
Apart from technical merits, of which there are only a few and they are debatable, one of the values of an operating system is the commitment of the company behind it -- and with clowns like Palm and HP who stopped issuing updates only months after launch, I say fuck them and any carrier who allowed these pieces of shit to pass technical acceptance.
The only reason I've hung onto this thing for 2 years is because I'm determined to make this the phone that loses Sprint my business.
I happen to own a Palm Pre 2 and I have a completely different perception. It's light, small and responsive and the way you use it, the just-type interface, the cards thing, is very natural.
It was the first mobile OS that handled running multiple applications in a crisp clean way. Notifications were done very well. These are two very key components. Combine that with a hardware keyboard and an easy/common development platform.
It was totally mismanaged.
I was thinking about the Pre3.. Now I'm stuck with the Android or switching carriers for an iPhone. Neither are pleasing choices.
> Why would anyone license something that's basically stillborn even with a company as big as HP pushing it?
Remember the word license here has multiple meanings ... I read it as a coded message to the other players - start getting ready to "license our patents" or get ready to be sued. In the world of patent MAD the only way to sue and not get sued back with patents is not to have any products. And look what HP is doing - basically announcing the spinning of any product that might be a target and then sending a coded message about "licensing" to its competitors. My tin foil hat might be over-sensitive, but reading between the lines this sounds all too close to be true. When you tie the timing in with Googorola - valuing patents at $510k each - you can imagine this might just have pushed them over the edge to a completely different monetization strategy for WebOS.
Kin brought some decent tech to the scene but was heavily hampered by Verizon requiring a full cost data plan for a phone that was aimed at teens. Also was an abject failure of the Danger acquisition by Microsoft, so lets see how Google/Motorola does.
Danger was a bit of a different scenario; the Sidekicks[1] and Kin were actually made by Sharp and Motorola, and Microsoft dumped Danger's OS for a WinCE derivative (not to mention the rumblings of being kneecapped by the WP7 team and such). Motorola does their own hardware, they already use Android exclusively, already had a working relationship with Google (Droid, Xoom), and Google doesn't seem intent on totally absorbing Moto like MS did Danger.
[1] Or Hiptops, depending on if you're in Magenta territory or not
I don't see how having WinCE as the OS hurt Kin's chances in the market after it shipped? I am with you on the kneecapping from the WP team though.
>Motorola does their own hardware, they already use Android exclusively, already had a working relationship with Google (Droid, Xoom), and Google doesn't seem intent on totally absorbing Moto like MS did Danger.
That's a really hard tightrope walk for Google. The last one to try this model of both making hardware and licensing the OS was Apple during the nineties and we all know how that ended.
They need to make money from Motorola (currently it's at breakeven) to justify the purchase price for shareholders, but without pissing off the other OEMs like Samsung/HTC. I am not saying it can't be done, but it's very very hard.
Switching to a winCE based OS delayed the release by at least a year, which definitely hurt their chances in the market. Not to mention that it probably made whatever internal pressures from phone 7 much worse as well, since the phone 7 project was not nearly as far along when kin might have originally shipped. Huge, classic Microsoft mistake to rewrite the OS based on windows tech.
Yeah, seems like ego got in the way of doing what's best for the product. Microsoft just couldn't live with themselves if they ever shipped a product that wasn't entirely "Invented Here."
> I don't see how having WinCE as the OS hurt Kin's chances in the market after it shipped?
They already had an OS they were developing on, and insider reports were that scrapping it and rebuilding on top of WinCE just to satisfy the Windows everywhere mandate cost them a year of development.
WinCE might not have hurt it after it shipped, but shipping in a much different market than the one they would have hit a year earlier certainly did.
VZW originally planned to provide more attractive data plans and provide full marketing support, but Microsoft was so late getting the Kin to market that VZW essentially threw their hands in the air and dropped those plans.
They spent $1.2 billion on Palm, only to kill the whole project after it had been on the market in 48 days?! I had no doubt that HP would bungle that acquisition, but I didn't think they'd do it so spectacularly.
Wow. That was incompetent. Talk about ignoring your OODA loop. Who is the new guy running HP these days?
Had HP been smart they would have stayed in the tablet business and aggressively integrated it with their software stack. Letting customers buy HP from end to end, sort of like Apple.
They've just handed Apple a much easier path into the enterprise market - which they don't seem to be wasting.
Apotheker is the CEO, and he strikes me as the wrong CEO for this company. This decision is bad, and I am not surprised it is being made during his tenure. He is a guy who is good with cost savings, but lacks in vision.
I think he agrees with you. The solution he has come up with is to turn HP into a company he is the right CEO for. No hardware, more ERP type software. Shades of SAP which is where he was before HP.
Not a great business plan if you ask me. You see it a lot in sports: change all of the players to match the new coach's plan rather than adapting the plan to fit the players you have. Usually they stumble around for a few years during the "turnaround" and then repeat the cycle with the next coach.
Another CEO did the same thing. Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple. Jobs brought in his own team and basically just kept the Apple name. Seems to be working so far.
yeah, that seems to be the common analysis of the move: the founder's vision was abandoned a while ago, they're just setting fire to the remnants junking the yard.
The difference is when Jobs started NeXT it was a new iteration of the Apple idea, so when he brought that team in it was a new heart for the old body, with the same DNA. There's literally no available comparison to that situation, and nothing remotely to do with HPs situation today.
Either way they are all doing a terrible job. How long have they had webOS? Like a year and a half? How many products have they managed to ship out in that time? Like 2? Guess you can't buy your way out of incompetence.
He's awful. He got quietly shuffled out of SAP after 18 months as CEO. If you're trying to innovate in a technology company, he's definitely not the person to do so.
I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who works for SAP and apparently he has a very established network of large enterprise companies who would buy his ERP software if he told them to buy it. This is how enterprise software works by the way - its not by value but by the shake of a hand. The question is what software do they have to sell? Sure they bought Autonomy, but that's only a small piece of the pie.
I'm developing software for a health organization in Canada, and you should see the reactions I get from users when they realize that I listened to their concerns and tailored the software to them. I feel like Santa at Christmas.
Apotheker has a vision. His specialty is to steer companies away from the consumer market and to make them enterprise oriented. I have to believe that this was the game plan when he was hired.
This sounds reasonable, and I also think it is better for HP to just sell their hardware to enterprises and add software to create complete appliances, instead of competing with Apple in the consumer market. However, was this really the best exit he could get for Palm in the span of one year? Also, why did they buy Palm? To compete in the enterprise mobile market (which surely will be large) But then, why not sell the Touchpad to enterprises and integrate it with the software from the start? Could be an unbeatable combination. Well, let's see what happens in the next months. I know that some executives from SAP/SAP Business Objects followed him but I haven't seen any big announcement of software offerings.
I don't see Apple heading into the enterprise market. Anything they sell to enterprise is just a bonus - their model remains to sell devices with a three year support lifecycle and no concern for legacy systems and backward compatibility.
Ofcourse apple will want to enter enterprise. They want to fuel their future growth somehow and enterprise is much more willing to give apple a shot than before. Microsoft should be worried about this which has traditionally had a stronghold on enterprise.
I've reviewed the iOS Volume Purchase Program in some detail recently. It's not "enterprise" in any sense that I would use that word. To me, enterprise solutions means tightly coupled service and support, and negotiable terms/pricing. iOS VPP is a take it or leave it proposition.
I don't blame Apple for ignoring enterprise customers: they're usually a huge pain in the ass to deal with, and rarely have a clear idea of what they actually want. They engage suppliers just to have "a neck to choke" when things inevitably fall apart.
The iOS VPP is for purchasing apps that are most likely not made by Apple. How could they provide support or negotiate pricing for something made by someone else?
That's my point: it's not a traditional "enterprise" market. Neither price (what you pay to Apple) nor terms are negotiable. There is a certain amount of "support" involved, via the App Store approval/appeal process and transaction dispute handling, etc.
Exactly. Apple can't go after the enterprise market in the way Microsoft or Oracle do without sacrificing the soul of the company. It's the converse of the reason that Microsoft does so poorly in the new consumer electronics markets.
I've had my hands on one of these tablets. It could not connect to WPA Enterprise, so I sort of have a feeling they weren't really thinking about business adoption to begin with.
HP recently did a lunch-and-learn for the IT staff at my university. They had marketing material that heavily pitched WebOS as the basis of enterprise-ready products.
Apple never had a well-developed enterprise strategy, but after killing the xserve and xserve raid and integrating their server software with their consumer OS at least they have a coherent one: they don't care about it.
It is amazing to me that of everyone who has made tablets, only Apple seems to be successful at it. Maybe it is just like someone said recently: there is no tablet market; just an iPad market.
Also, two of those Xooms are gathering dust here at work. We got them intending to write Android versions of the iOS apps we were making... The iPads were fought over, but one of the Xooms ended up in a file cabinet for a few months, and the other has barely been touched either. I feel sorry for those things. The only thing a Xoom is really good for is disappointing your kids on Christmas morning.
Asus claims to be selling 400,000 Eee tablets a month. I own one, and when I went to pick up a cover sleeve at Central Computers* lately they said the things are flying off the shelves.
I love Central Computer! It has the selection of Fry's, but the employees actually speak english and the merchandise is well lit and organized... and for that you do pay quite a premium over Fry's, but it's worth it.
We will have more data points on that 'observation' when Windows 8 launches
Sorry, but I just find this statement hard to agree with. Microsoft is forever shipping some "game changer" "pretty soon now", but they haven't managed to change any games in a very long time now.
If Microsoft, or anyone else, has some revolutionary thing, it will be interesting to see it when it happens. But I am certainly not anticipating any such event in the next year.
> "I'm beggining to wonder if MS are actually scared of being innovative."
This might actually be a pretty good summary of MSFT's corporate culture.
The impression I always get from the inside is that it's a company dominated by middle managers. They've got so many PMs in so many layers that you'd wonder if it's just PMs all the way down.
The combination of mature, gigantic company, lack of strong leadership, and extremely generous benefits has combined to create a population of people who are there for the stability and extremely afraid of rocking the boat or killing the golden goose.
Instead, they are slowly bleeding the goose dry. Granted, the golden goose is still pretty fat and could sustain them for decades without doing anything significant. As it is though, Microsoft is pretty low in the innovation front. I don't think anybody has been "wowed" by any of their products since maybe Windows XP.
If you haven't read this, this is a short article on what Apple does so differently than almost all of its competitors - never announce something before it is shippable (e.g. production-qualified and vetted, supply chain and all)
Yes, it is really just a matter of time... and of Android tablet manufacturers finding the sweet spot between features and pricing (which ASUS has with the Transformer but other manufacturers have been iffy with thus far)... but that too is just another thing time is already sorting out.
There is no way Android represents 20% of the tablets sold this year. Seriously, I doubt it's 5%.
It's incredible that anyone can make that claim when it's patently obvious from simple observation that there are hardly any Android tablets in the wild. If they're going to pull numbers out of their ass to create the perception that Android is succeeding on tablets, they should at least make up numbers that are marginally plausible.
I'm not clear as to if you were trying for irony with that statement so I'll call you on it:
Seriously, I doubt it's 5%
...they should at least make up numbers that are marginally ...
If your going to mock someone for "making up" numbers try not to make up numbers of your own in the same post. The op provided data, you did not. Unless you were going for irony; in that case, well never mind.
I don't think it's incredible to make that claim at all. The iPad has been around for quite a bit longer so you would expect to see a lot more of them in the wild despite only outselling android tablets by approximately a 4 to one margin at the moment.
Despite this, I still routinely see android tablets in airports. I saw a galaxy tab 7" tonight (along with 3 people using ipads in first class). I've also seen a few galaxy tab 10.1s and a couple of HTC Flyers.
To be clear, I also wonder if the actual ratio is 4 to one. I just don't think the number is completely outside the realm of possibility.
Yeah yeah, but "Tablet PC" is not the same device as we mean today when we say tablet. And also, I guess by "successfully making tablets" you mean "being the only mfg who bothers with the incredibly tiny niche of Tablet PC buyers consisting of warehouse operations, hospitals, and about 20 really nerdy college students." And even then, much of that niche may in the future go to "real tablets" that run mobile OSs instead of Windows XP/7. For one thing, "real tablets" in the modern sense cost about a third of those huge pen-based Windows things.
Correct, no true Scotsman has three heads and an integrated espresso machine. Likewise, the Fujitsu tablets have nothing in common with current iOS/Android devices.
edit: Care to explain the down votes? It's too early to make such proclamations. It took a while for the cellphone market to catch up with Apple, why should we expect the tablet market to be any different?
True, but the tablet market is in one important aspect different from the phone market, in that the distribution channels are vastly different. Many who buy a new phone just take what the carriers are shoving in their sales channel.
In the best case scenario the iPad could play out more like the iPod: year after year there were prominent iPod-killers like the Zune and cheap knockoffs and year after year Apple dominated the market.
iPhone didn't immediately command a large percentage of the market, the iPad does. This is much closer to the iPod situation where many companies tried to match it but failed.
For one thing it was Apple's exclusivity with AT&T that opened the door for Verizon to push Android which played a vital role in its success. Things are a bit different with the iPad being that it's offered in both CDMA and GSM and the wifi-only model is, by far, the most popular.
It's also important to note there's really only one successful competitor to the iPhone -- Android. WebOS is dead, RIM is on the ropes, HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, etc didn't catch up as much as they let Google catch-up and they rode their success. (my point being we can't under estimate the difficulty in trying to compete toe-to-toe with iOS as only one company has done it successfully to date)
I don't think that's the case, but there definitely isn't a market for tablets that fail to compete on features or price.
The brilliance of what Apple has done with their mobile products is hard to overstate. They put all this effort into designing mobile chips and a mobile OS for the iPhone and iPod Touch. They took the fruits of those efforts and stuck them into a tablet format, and bam, you've got an iPad. They took them and stuck them into a set-top box, and bam, you've got the Apple TV 2G.
They get to spread the development costs of their silicon and OS over these four product lines. Talk about efficient reuse of your development investment. I own three separate devices powered by an A4 CPU and iOS operating system.
I would like to see where that number is coming from. I've seen a lot of number's based on units shipped, but none on "actual" units sold. Curious what the 20% is actually based on.
Main reason being they can't even compete on price without those fat carrier subsidies that it took to get Android for phones off the ground. They're pretty much at price parity with the market leader with a fraction of the useful apps, and surprised why they're not selling that well.
Anyone who thinks Android would be the leading smartphone OS if their devices were sold at price parity with iPhones is deluding themselves.
Similarly, if Apple wanted to overtake Windows PC markethsare with Macs (they don't) they would be foolish not to compete on price. When you are asking the user to try something new (or new to them) and non-mainstream, "pay more for this risky new thing" isn't a very attractive proposition.
It's even more efficient when you just relabel a standard chip you bought from Samsung and just tell everyone that you've put lots of effort into designing it. Works much better than I'd have imagined anyway.
Intrinsity does not "create customized ARM chips", they optimize existing designs. There's been nothing impressive so far in Apple's chips, they're pretty standard design though thought to have been optimized by Intrinsity's folks.
Innovative custom designs were expected from the PA Semi acquisition. Apparently did not pan out, since it's been three years and there isn't much to show for it.
At least for the A4/Hummingbird, Intrinsity optimised the existing Cortex-A8 design for Samsung and before Apple bought them, so you disagree based on faulty facts.
SAMSUNG and Intrinsity Jointly Develop the World's Fastest ARM® Cortex™-A8 Processor Based Mobile Core
"Seoul, Korea, Austin, Texas - July 27, 2009 : Samsung and Intrinsity today jointly announced the industry's fastest mobile processor core implementation of the dual-issue ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor architecture in 45 nanometer (nm) Low Power (LP), low leakage process technology. This Cortex-A8 implementation, code-named Hummingbird, delivers 2000DMIPS at 1GHz. The Hummingbird comes with 32KB each of data and instruction caches, an L2 cache, the size of which can be customized, and an ARM® NEON™ multi-media extension. Performance and power consumption of the Hummingbird have been validated in silicon. Samsung is currently developing standard mobile SoC products using this new core."
At least for the A4/Hummingbird, Intrinsity optimised the existing Cortex-A8 design for Samsung and before Apple bought them, so you disagree based on faulty facts.
Your going to have tell me what you think is wrong, because I can't read minds. I can't see any problem, but I'll rephrase to see if it's just the sentence structure that's confusing you:
Samsung worked with a company called Intrinsity.
They took the Cortex-A8 design, and Intrinsity made it a bit more power efficient.
Samsung sells these chips, and uses them in their devices.
They also sell them to Apple.
Apple gets Samsung to put Apple logos on them, and refers to them as the A4.
Apple bought the company called Intrinsity after all the work on the A4 was finished, nothing they've done in the pay of Apple has any impact on the A4 or Hummingbird core.
I responded to someone claiming that Intrinsity customised the chips for Apple. This isn't true. I linked to a press release that shows this.
The iPad 2 has a smaller, lower resolution display than the other tablets in those charts. Once you compensate for that it still has an advantage, but barely. It hardly leaves the other tablets "in the dust".
You appear to be claiming that this is a demonstration of how much better Apple's custom ARM chips are, when it's just a better GPU in the core, just like Samsung's Hummingbirds in the Galaxy and Nexus S used the next GPU up compared with the iPhone 4. They're all PowerVRs. It's about as technically impressive as us both buying a laptop from Dell and me buying a laptop with a better GPU than yours.
I suppose you could give Apple 10% credit seeing how they bought that much of the company that makes them (again, after starting to use their products) but then Intel should get even more credit, because they've owned more, for longer.
There's two sides to this argument and you appear to have missed the important half. Anyone can slap a better GPU on and get better framerates. Not just anyone can slap on "the next GPU up" and still beat you in battery life.
Everything I've ever read about Apple's supposed optimizations is that they have to do with power efficiency.
It depends what you mean by successful. The Android tablets are selling reasonably well - ASUS is claiming ~1 million sales (to consumers) and forecasting 1m more by the end of the year. It ain't iPad level but it's a strong showing and it's just one tablet out of half a dozen.
Moreover, ASUS is following the Transformer up with the eee Pad Slider in September and a second-generation Transformer using Tegra 3 Kal-El (though the release-date rumors for this vary). In other words, ASUS isn't just talking the talk, they're walking the walk.
Companies seem to give in too quickly, though. The tablet thing has only just started. Most non-ipad tablets simply sucked. Instead of giving in, they should create better tablets.
I agree. It's going to take some time for manufacturers to pull their heads out of there asses on tablets. If you want to compete with Apple, your tablet has to be cheaper. Otherwise, why would anyone buy it? And, it has to not completely suck.
Speaking as someone who ordered one within Europe as soon as it was released directly from Europe, I'm frankly disgusted by this news and disgusted with the execs at HP. Will never buy one of their products again.
I didn't expect my prediction to come true quite that fast: RIM and HP are the big losers here; I can't see any reason to buy into the Blackberry OS or WebOS from either a consumer or business point of view.
(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879195)
HP spent $1.2B to acquire Palm a little over a year ago. According to Google Patents, Palm is the assignee in 12,000 patents. If HP can sell off the Palm patents for the same $/patent as Google is paying in their Motorola acquisition, they would net $8.8B.
It's a sad day for innovation when patents are worth more than the product they back. Why wouldn't HP kill off webOS? How long would it have taken them to make $7B in profits off of webOS?
I think we are quickly approaching a point of patent detente. Google needs to get a few more patents and indemnify Android OEMs and maybe lob a few lawsuits at Bing etc. and MS will quickly cross license. Same against Apple.
And one sign of a "mature market" is that barriers to entry rise. So for the big players the game of patent poker is the price they pay to keep the innovations down to a dull roar and to "manage the competitive environment", for actual innovators It just means that the slope is steeper, and if they are at all successful they will attract predators like Lodsys/IV.
And while a few more entrepreneurs getting ground into hamburger by lawyers isn't that big of a concern in the larger scheme of things; it does mean that innovation in the tech sector is tamed and that we lose out on great products that never get a chance to compete in the marketplace.
$1.2B for the acquisition, sure, but what about the money put into the development of the TouchPad, Pre 3, etc, in addition to the costs of distribution and marketing?
Regardless, it does seem like they could still make a hefty profit off of selling the patents (and if there's one thing we all need more of, it's patent talk...)
Which is exactly my point: they would be in an even better position had they not even developed those new devices and enhancements to the OS. At least we got a year's worth of innovation before they realized it made more sense to sell the patents rather than the product.
what i think lawyers and justice departments want patent war to go on as it will profit them, and this people are very powerful they know the laws inside out. Lawmakers or the congress will not pass any legislation to curb this problem as it profit many people its a money making pot. so the patent war will go on as usual and google or any other company will have to take concrete steps to shield themself.
The patent portfolio of Palm is maybe not much worth. The WebOS was introduced 2009 and postdates the iPhone.
And Palm did in 2003 spun off their operating system (think of the Treo PDA/Smartphones), which was then bought by a japanese company (Access ltd). Microsoft did license last year a few dozen "Palm" patents from them. I guess any valuable patents date from that time frame but are not owned by Palm anymore.
They paid 1.2B to acquire those patents and Palm itself. It seems obvious that the market values those patents at somewhere < 1.2 billion.
Even if they've appreciated of late, their selling price last year is probably a lot more instructive as to their value than "$/patent" in the Motorola deal.
I don't think HP is throwing the towel, just not putting all eggs in a single basket. They know now how big a challenge is to turn it around on the tablet market. Cloud's the thing now so they're also getting into it.
Yeah, they're also selling off their PC division and buying Autonomy (records management industry leader from the UK) for $10 billion. Overpriced IMHO.
I'd rather see them come out brandishing the Palm brand, and acquiring Fon, and then going after a "home cloud" machine. We could use the "unlimited" home connections we already pay for that are often pretty good (<40ms latency, at least 2mbps up). Handling the home-router firewall in a simplistic way seems to be the best way forward.
I'd love to see a true "open source" mobile operating system make an appearance. However, I don't think HP has a track record of magnanimity when it comes to open sourcing expensive acquisitions IP.
No corp is going to open source their proprietary technology when they stand to make money from selling it. There won't be an open source mobile OS, the best we can hope for are OSes with browser shells (Boot 2 Gecko) and html5 as the platform.
Really? Seriously? Who would buy WebOS today? I'm all ears. I'm sure HP is too. Not only has it failed to gain a foothold under two separate companies, there is no successful licensed (more than $0 cost) mobile OS on the market today. You have two vertically integrated (AAPL and RIMM), and one free one (Android). Windows Phone is not as much of a failure as WebOS, but that doesn't exactly make the job easier for WebOS's next owner. It just means they have to fight even to be #3.
Come to think of it, open sourcing the whole thing could be a good move. It's the Netscape strategy all over again. It wouldn't really make HP any money, though, so they won't.
There are more buyers than just those who aspire to compete with the big dogs. WebOS has application far beyond just mobile OSes. Even PalmSource was sold and Garnet OS was in development until just a couple of years ago. There are thousands of potential buyers that have nothing to do with the smartphone wars.
I have a hard time with the WebOS failed to get a foothold under two separate companies.
HP never really tried. $1.2B and then trashing it so quickly? That's not trying.
This was a perfect opportunity to take the time and do it right. A company that was/is good with hardware, now has a great mobile OS. It had some time to take the loss financially with success of other areas (laptops, enterprise software, etc).
Actually, Apple sold out their Lisa stock after they rebranded it "Mac XL". Turns out there was a market for a "professional" Mac with an internal hard drive back then.
I was. Are you still planning on getting a Pre3 in spite of the announcement? I could deal with a smaller number of apps; but now I'm worried there simply won't be any apps at all for the ecosystem.
I'm still sort of considering it. I already knew there wouldn't be many apps. That's actually fine for me because I'm buying it for the sole purpose of developing for. I use C/C++ and libSDL (which has support on all the major phone systems) for development.
I don't use that many apps actually. Typically I just use a web browser, an ssh client (yes I actually SSH out from my phone often), and the odd solitaire card game every once in a while.
woot-offs are where not-so-successful consumer electronics go to die these days (and I say this as a big fan of woot, and bargain basement priced semi-abandoned technology).
They could do something exceptionally creative, they could sell them at half-cost with full schematics and data sheets for all of the parts. Plus documentation on the boot process, identify jtag/test ports, maybe boot rom source code.
This would save them from an expensive e-recycling bill.
It would put a lot of now 'open' tablets on the market which would give a huge cadre of people who would give it a shot a chance to do something amazing. It could change the world.
Its a shame that winning the lottery is more likely than this outcome.
In an interesting test of Google+ I shared an open letter to HP with this suggestion to 'Public.' Since I don't think anyone from HP follows me it probably won't get anywhere but if you see it and reshare it, perhaps it could increase the odds.
Apple's path of disruption continues. I hope they open source WebOS, but they will probably sell it for the patents based on what MMI got from Google.
I wish Nokia would have bought Palm.
Expect the PC market to be disrupted next by Apple with Macbook Airs sucking up all the profits, and iOS devices crimping unit growth. Who is going to stick their neck out to make single-digit margins on a Windows 8 tablet?
I agree the Macbook Air is an incredibly compelling hardware product placing the low-end mac in the same market as the high-end pc laptop.
However, in the mid-to-low end, your average Windows machine is still significantly cheaper than a similarly equiped Mac. Expect PCs to still own the low-priced market.
I'm not sure where you get your 'single-digit margins' comment from, but what are the real options for hardware manufacturers? You can't make a product without an OS, and your options are Android and Windows. I for one prefer a Windows device (WP over Android anyway). There is a market.
Meanwhile, PC sales are declining in the U.S. and Europe. So it's a slow/negative growth market with small profits.
Virtually all of the (non-Apple) profit in the PC market accumulates to Microsoft and Intel. Windows costs around $50, that means that even if they could make a tablet as cheaply as Apple, they would still make significantly less profit.
And there is no evidence at all that anyone can compete with the iPad right now.
True. Until the generation who is now about 10 grows up and starts driving the PC buying decisions. They'll have been using tablets for 8 years or so and will think nothing of writing a paper on a tablet (bluetooth keyboards being easily available, although kids who have had smartphones since before puberty may end up being just fine typing everything on touch screens) and consuming all their media on a tablet and their smartphone. No bulky laptop required. What does a laptop add, from the point of view of a consumer? The ability to choose from a wide range of anti-virus software and browser toolbars?
So when they go to college, they will see a bargain basement PC laptop with Windows 10 Home Basic Limited Edition (~$600) or an iPad 11 ($500), or an Android "Vanilla Custard" tablet ($449). Which one will they choose? I don't know, but I know it's not the crappy laptop.
AAPL is positioning themselves in anticipation of that day, I have no doubt about it. They intend the iPad to be the "best" tablet the same way the iPod was the best MP3 player, and by 2007 everyone seemed to own an iPod. Once people are ready to let go of PCs the same way we let go of floppies, CRT monitors, and dial-up modems, they will be positioned as the smart choice.
Inevitable decision. It's really hard to do complete stack unless you are completely comitted to it like aaple is. It was always going to be an uphill battle for HP and I am glad they realized this sooner than later. I said this before. Nokia did a smart thing by adopting a third party software and leveraging their position in hardware to get a good bargain in return.
HP sent me a TouchPad a couple weeks ago and after the first 2 days I haven't touched it. It just didn't seem like a finished product. I got errors and buggy UI interactions regularly. It lacked mature apps for basic usage like reading ebooks. Also, the screen rotation sensor is really sensitive so it almost always needs to have the orientation locked.
A couple things I did like about the TouchPad over the iPad: shift key on the keyboard to access special chars easier and downloading apps without being thrown out of the App Store.
“I went out for dinner with someone new, but my date was late to pick me up, the car was uncomfortable, the place I was taken had terrible service, and I had the runs after eating the food there.”
“Yeah, but your date has learned a lot from taking people on dates like that and most of that stuff has been fixed. How about another date?”
Not making fun of your factually correct statement, obviously, just pointing out that in many cases you do not get a second chance to make a first impression.
I disagree. Consider people's first impressions of the iPhone when the iPhone 2G launched, or of Android when the G1 launched, or how almost every Blackberry device has launched with buggy firmware requiring users to update the OS only a couple of weeks after launch.
You're picking and choosing a specific example when, if you recall everyone else, it was pretty much the same thing. Buggy software was the sole reason why the TouchPad or even WebOS failed.
I feel like the prevailing sentiment in 2007 was that most everything Apple chose to include in the iPhone, they executed well. It wasn't all that buggy at launch. However, there was a lot of very valid criticism of it--mostly that it had many glaring omissions -- 3G, copy/paste, ability to turn off autocomplete so you can type in other languages, etc.
This has gone on to be the core of the Apple mobile strategy--they don't worry about being first to market with every feature, rather the biggest concern is not to ship buggy/unreliable stuff that doesn't deliver on its promises. If at all possible.
This is also the major disadvantage for anyone new coming into this space.
Apple got to launch their incomplete-but-solid product and then spend a year or two refining it and incrementally adding features. That's the advantage of redefining/creating the market you launch in though, it doesn't extend to anyone else.
For anyone trying to compete with them now, they have to hit the ground running with a comparable-or-better feature set (which I assume is why Android vendors make so much fuss about Flash) _and_ comparable polish.
Same here. I had the original 2G iPHone and its was absolutely amazing. It's hard to remember the state of cell phones back then anymore, but it was revolutionary imo and worked great from day one.
"Sole reason" I can't agree with, but WebOS has bugs that's for sure. I bought an HP Veer around Week 1. Last month I went back to my iPhone4 and I wouldn't go back (even before this announcement).
The Veer lags sometimes, for no obvious reason. Touches often register with the droplet effect, but fail to actually trigger the button you clearly hit. The Palm account had no way to update it online (better not forget to update your CC# before a purchase or you've effectively bricked the app-market). Mail was laggy, and seemed to rarely update properly. I couldn't have both my Work GoogleApps Mail, and my regular GMail on the phone as GMail accounts. I had to setup my personal account as an Exchange account.
None of these were instant deal-breakers, but with no updates, no fixes, and no communication I got tired of waiting for a fix that may never come.
Of course the app-store/market/whatever kinda sucked too.
My biggest peeve was copy & paste. Mentioned in another reply, but before the 2G iPhone I never had a real need for copy & paste since there weren't really worthwhile apps to copy & paste between on the feature-phones back then.
The WebOS copy/paste however absolutely sucks. It's tricky, I never remembered if it's Option+C or gesture-area+C no matter how many times I did it.
Oh, and the Veer screen was OK for most stuff, but waaay too small for web-browsing without Android's ability to re-flow text on zoom.
Along with patches, it is quite smooth indeed. Of course, the argument can and should be made that it should have shipped this way.
It is possible to set up Google Apps and personal Gmail on the same phone. Simply select GMail and enter email addresses with full domain i.e. you@work.com and you@gmail.com
I've done this (GMail setup). Didn't work for me. It appears to be a common problem.
I also installed a number of patches from Preware, but nothing to my knowledge really addresses any of these concerns.
The "laggy" effects are software, not CPU. Even another 50% CPU isn't going to help a 3-second pause every time you send an SMS. It isn't going to prevent clearly software related bugs in the Mail app. It's also not going to make the buggy software decide to start triggering events on buttons it's clearly already registering (due to the droplet indicator on taps).
It's not going to make copy/paste as smooth as a double-tap, drag a point to highlight selection, tap "Copy" and done. Honestly I never did figure out the way to highlight the selection I wanted consistently. I'm pretty sure text-selections are not an OS-wide feature.
Even if in the past 30 days community patches came out to address all these issues (I seriously doubt it), who wants to depend on the grace of others for a product you just paid $250 for a couple months ago when the company that sold you the product is more interested in releasing and patching/updating a tablet?
Add to that no Pre3, the 2.1, 2.2, 3.0 fragmentation, and it was clear that without some major, visible effort on HP's part the Veer was already dead.
Plus the damn phone doesn't provide an option to keep the screen off on the Touchstone charger without a community patch. That issue has been around since my old Pre Minus! Seriously WebOS? 9 out of 10 smartphone owners I know use their phone as their alarm clock. I don't want a damn flashlight to turn on 12" from my head on my nightstand at 3AM because I got an automated email. If it's not a SMS or Phone Call, turn off and stay off when I push the Lock button.
The one redeeming application on the app-store was the Remix music player. First non-iPhone music player I could get behind (I used to own a Nexus S, never found anything on Android that seemed to focus on the simple act of browsing your music library quickly and just playing). HP should've bought the app and replaced their ugly WinAmp3/Win95 era junk with it. :-) Too late now...
As one of the few people that's actually used WebOS on a phone, when I try the TouchPad I'm baffled at how slow and clunky it is. The UI is smooth on even the Palm Pixi but on the TouchPad I get plenty of lag and glitches.
It's like Cisco and the Flip, isn't it - pure market plays, zero technical vision or willingness to go over the market'snhead to consumers. That said, HP never had a compelling vision for the mass market anyway.
No one seems to remember that it took the iPod 3-4 years to take over the MP3 market.
HP also bungled by not offering a 7" model, and not competing on price from the very beginning, even if it meant running at a loss to chase market share.
Agreed. You have to wonder how they ever thought they would succeed if they were going to give in this easily. Any fool could see it was going to be harder than the effort they've made so far. It was always premised on pushing WebOS on all their PCs and other strategic ways to promote it ... none of which ever got even tried.
They're also selling off their PC division, and buying Autonomy (http://www.autonomy.com/), who produce search and data-mining type software. I assume this is an attempt to re-focus on enterprise back-end stuff; this is a pretty big part of their business already, so I can see how this move might make sense.
Glad we told them we weren't interested in developing apps when they contacted us on April 15. I eventually had a phone call with the fellow who emailed us, and I explained to him HP was doomed. He told me they were sure they could be a strong third!
Here was the original email:
Hello,
I am part of Hewlett-Packard’s Business Development team that focuses on engaging one-on-one in strategic relationships with leading partners for webOS app opportunities.
I wanted to touch base with you to see how things were going with your "APP NAME REDACTED", and also discuss with you our plans for HP’s upcoming webOS tablet launch.
If you have some time, it would be great to connect to share where we are headed, and also hear more about your mobile strategy.
Let me know when you’d be available and I can schedule a call- I hope to speak with you soon.
At least they reached out to you. I kept trying and trying to reach someone at HP regarding an issue with an app I was working on for a company I assume they would have wanted on board, but to this day, TO THIS DAY, I got nowhere with HP.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadAs Nokia's CEO said, it's a battle of ecosystems now, not devices anymore. Maybe RIM's next, either for a takeover, or a failure.
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-rim-google-hp-palm-2010...
One year later, I'm sure whatever it was Apple saw in Palm (patents, according to the above article) is still there.
An unnamed source claimed something that the article itself says there's a bunch of problems with this idea and we are supposed to believe it? It was more likely a rumour that someone at Palm was putting around to try and push the price up, and the "source" believed it.
There's probably not a high-margin future for it but surely it would be an asset for a consumer company.
However! I think the big sale is yet to come. When HP bought Palm, they acquired their 1,600-ish patents as well. Palm was a very early player in the smartphone market, so it's conceivable that this portfolio contains some attractive property. Having paid $1.2 billion for Palm, either selling this patent portfolio outright, or taking the Lodsys route seems plausible. Given the heat around patent acquisition right now, they'd probably do pretty well; maybe even exceeding their original purchase price.
And besides, I am not certain webOS licensing is going to go very far. We will see..
a) webOS is an OS that has been shipped on much more than just this latest tablet. It's a fantastic OS, but has been hampered by poor execution by Palm & HP.
b) Android tablets are not selling well.
I dont' doubt HP is still going to build Tablets and phones they're just likely going to be Android.
Or does this mean HP is getting out of mobile altogether? If so, that's a huge mistake, given the state of the market right now. Especially if they are spinning off the PC side of things, what's left for HP? Printers?
Unlike the other options, webOS is composed of two open source projects. What prevents someone from knitting them together, with a little hardware interfacing? Would it be legally problematic to attempt to make an OS that was compatible with the existing webOS apps?
Not likely.
>HP’s wording up above leaves things a bit vague, with at least two potential routes left open: licensing webOS to others
Why would anyone license something that's basically stillborn even with a company as big as HP pushing it? Obvious choices for OEMs seem to be Android or Windows 8.
Sign me up for a $150 Touchpad at the firesale if there is one(resisting temptation to call it the Ouchpad like a headline did).
That's how much I am willing to spend for the latest OS with no future joining the ranks of good-but-dead ones like Amiga and BeOS.
This, of course, is coming from one of the suckers that paid $599 for a Touchpad on launch day, so take it with a grain of salt.
Apart from technical merits, of which there are only a few and they are debatable, one of the values of an operating system is the commitment of the company behind it -- and with clowns like Palm and HP who stopped issuing updates only months after launch, I say fuck them and any carrier who allowed these pieces of shit to pass technical acceptance.
The only reason I've hung onto this thing for 2 years is because I'm determined to make this the phone that loses Sprint my business.
It's really sad.
It was totally mismanaged.
I was thinking about the Pre3.. Now I'm stuck with the Android or switching carriers for an iPhone. Neither are pleasing choices.
Remember the word license here has multiple meanings ... I read it as a coded message to the other players - start getting ready to "license our patents" or get ready to be sued. In the world of patent MAD the only way to sue and not get sued back with patents is not to have any products. And look what HP is doing - basically announcing the spinning of any product that might be a target and then sending a coded message about "licensing" to its competitors. My tin foil hat might be over-sensitive, but reading between the lines this sounds all too close to be true. When you tie the timing in with Googorola - valuing patents at $510k each - you can imagine this might just have pushed them over the edge to a completely different monetization strategy for WebOS.
[1] Or Hiptops, depending on if you're in Magenta territory or not
>Motorola does their own hardware, they already use Android exclusively, already had a working relationship with Google (Droid, Xoom), and Google doesn't seem intent on totally absorbing Moto like MS did Danger.
That's a really hard tightrope walk for Google. The last one to try this model of both making hardware and licensing the OS was Apple during the nineties and we all know how that ended.
They need to make money from Motorola (currently it's at breakeven) to justify the purchase price for shareholders, but without pissing off the other OEMs like Samsung/HTC. I am not saying it can't be done, but it's very very hard.
Well, it meant the Danger team had to start from scratch, and the delay meant they were going up against tougher competition.
They already had an OS they were developing on, and insider reports were that scrapping it and rebuilding on top of WinCE just to satisfy the Windows everywhere mandate cost them a year of development.
WinCE might not have hurt it after it shipped, but shipping in a much different market than the one they would have hit a year earlier certainly did.
Had HP been smart they would have stayed in the tablet business and aggressively integrated it with their software stack. Letting customers buy HP from end to end, sort of like Apple.
They've just handed Apple a much easier path into the enterprise market - which they don't seem to be wasting.
Not a great business plan if you ask me. You see it a lot in sports: change all of the players to match the new coach's plan rather than adapting the plan to fit the players you have. Usually they stumble around for a few years during the "turnaround" and then repeat the cycle with the next coach.
Oh, and he refocused the company on its original core business, where Apotheker is moving HP away from its historical roots.
Of course, he might have been constrained by the CEO.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110711006653/en/HP-D...
I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who works for SAP and apparently he has a very established network of large enterprise companies who would buy his ERP software if he told them to buy it. This is how enterprise software works by the way - its not by value but by the shake of a hand. The question is what software do they have to sell? Sure they bought Autonomy, but that's only a small piece of the pie.
Startupreneurs who are looking to white-label to enterprise, STOP. dont waste your time.
A few years ago, under Mark Hurd, they bought EDS and Mercury for that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Interactive
Never heard of their software? Be glad.
Announced about a month ago...
http://www.apple.com/business/vpp/
I don't blame Apple for ignoring enterprise customers: they're usually a huge pain in the ass to deal with, and rarely have a clear idea of what they actually want. They engage suppliers just to have "a neck to choke" when things inevitably fall apart.
They aren't trying to run your enterprise for you, which is what a lot of ERP systems claim to do.
Apple is clearly going after the enterprise market on their terms, and their terms alone.
HP never exerted any effort into its tablet. It released a faulty device just to catch up with the rest of the vendors releasing devices.
I believe that the next wave of Android tablets will be awesome, so the next generation from Motorola and Samsung. HP doesn't seem interested.
1. http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal-tech/tablets/22...
My point was that saying the one true tablet is the iPad is false but HP is the wrong player to consider.
* best walk-in store in SF, btw
We will have more data points on that 'observation' when Windows 8 launches(April, say the rumors).
Sorry, but I just find this statement hard to agree with. Microsoft is forever shipping some "game changer" "pretty soon now", but they haven't managed to change any games in a very long time now.
If Microsoft, or anyone else, has some revolutionary thing, it will be interesting to see it when it happens. But I am certainly not anticipating any such event in the next year.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/05/microsofts-courier-digita...
It still makes the iPad look half baked.
but as is the way with MS they killed it and settled for mediocre.
I'm beggining to wonder if MS are actually scared of being innovative.
This might actually be a pretty good summary of MSFT's corporate culture.
The impression I always get from the inside is that it's a company dominated by middle managers. They've got so many PMs in so many layers that you'd wonder if it's just PMs all the way down.
The combination of mature, gigantic company, lack of strong leadership, and extremely generous benefits has combined to create a population of people who are there for the stability and extremely afraid of rocking the boat or killing the golden goose.
Making futuristic looking concept movies is pretty easy compared to actually making and shipping a physical product.
http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/
Anyway, thanks for the maximum 4 downvotes HN.
http://www.abiresearch.com/press/3753-Android+Takes+20%25+Me...
Android-based Phones were slower to get that much market-share, and we all know how that turned out. It's really just a matter of time.
Is it though? Shipments don't equal sales.
http://daringfireball.net/2011/07/ipad_dominance
It's incredible that anyone can make that claim when it's patently obvious from simple observation that there are hardly any Android tablets in the wild. If they're going to pull numbers out of their ass to create the perception that Android is succeeding on tablets, they should at least make up numbers that are marginally plausible.
Seriously, I doubt it's 5%
...they should at least make up numbers that are marginally ...
If your going to mock someone for "making up" numbers try not to make up numbers of your own in the same post. The op provided data, you did not. Unless you were going for irony; in that case, well never mind.
Despite this, I still routinely see android tablets in airports. I saw a galaxy tab 7" tonight (along with 3 people using ipads in first class). I've also seen a few galaxy tab 10.1s and a couple of HTC Flyers.
To be clear, I also wonder if the actual ratio is 4 to one. I just don't think the number is completely outside the realm of possibility.
That said, I would not recommend it to people. The iPad actually can, and does, do the job of a tablet pc far better than any tablet pc I've used.
edit: Care to explain the down votes? It's too early to make such proclamations. It took a while for the cellphone market to catch up with Apple, why should we expect the tablet market to be any different?
In the best case scenario the iPad could play out more like the iPod: year after year there were prominent iPod-killers like the Zune and cheap knockoffs and year after year Apple dominated the market.
It's also important to note there's really only one successful competitor to the iPhone -- Android. WebOS is dead, RIM is on the ropes, HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, etc didn't catch up as much as they let Google catch-up and they rode their success. (my point being we can't under estimate the difficulty in trying to compete toe-to-toe with iOS as only one company has done it successfully to date)
The brilliance of what Apple has done with their mobile products is hard to overstate. They put all this effort into designing mobile chips and a mobile OS for the iPhone and iPod Touch. They took the fruits of those efforts and stuck them into a tablet format, and bam, you've got an iPad. They took them and stuck them into a set-top box, and bam, you've got the Apple TV 2G.
They get to spread the development costs of their silicon and OS over these four product lines. Talk about efficient reuse of your development investment. I own three separate devices powered by an A4 CPU and iOS operating system.
Android is now 20% of the tablet market, while the BB Playbook is nowhere and the HP TouchPad can't even stay alive for two months.
Edit: Someone posted the link below.
Anyone who thinks Android would be the leading smartphone OS if their devices were sold at price parity with iPhones is deluding themselves.
Similarly, if Apple wanted to overtake Windows PC markethsare with Macs (they don't) they would be foolish not to compete on price. When you are asking the user to try something new (or new to them) and non-mainstream, "pay more for this risky new thing" isn't a very attractive proposition.
Innovative custom designs were expected from the PA Semi acquisition. Apparently did not pan out, since it's been three years and there isn't much to show for it.
It's customizing the design, not creating a custom design.
SAMSUNG and Intrinsity Jointly Develop the World's Fastest ARM® Cortex™-A8 Processor Based Mobile Core
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/newsVie...
"Seoul, Korea, Austin, Texas - July 27, 2009 : Samsung and Intrinsity today jointly announced the industry's fastest mobile processor core implementation of the dual-issue ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor architecture in 45 nanometer (nm) Low Power (LP), low leakage process technology. This Cortex-A8 implementation, code-named Hummingbird, delivers 2000DMIPS at 1GHz. The Hummingbird comes with 32KB each of data and instruction caches, an L2 cache, the size of which can be customized, and an ARM® NEON™ multi-media extension. Performance and power consumption of the Hummingbird have been validated in silicon. Samsung is currently developing standard mobile SoC products using this new core."
You realize this doesn't make sense...right?
Samsung worked with a company called Intrinsity. They took the Cortex-A8 design, and Intrinsity made it a bit more power efficient. Samsung sells these chips, and uses them in their devices. They also sell them to Apple. Apple gets Samsung to put Apple logos on them, and refers to them as the A4. Apple bought the company called Intrinsity after all the work on the A4 was finished, nothing they've done in the pay of Apple has any impact on the A4 or Hummingbird core.
I responded to someone claiming that Intrinsity customised the chips for Apple. This isn't true. I linked to a press release that shows this.
So what am I missing?
Meh, ARM is a space where a number of companies are already in cutthroat competition and no one is going to walk in and totally change the game.
Apple's MO here is pretty clear:
(1) investigate their options thoroughly,
(2) back the best price/performance,
(3) possibly make some optimizations,
(4) then lock up the supply if possible.
...
And the results actually are pretty impressive, iPad 2 leaves every other tablet in the dust:
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4605/40363.png
While getting the best battery life in the category:
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4605/40257.png
44 fps / 1.30 = 33.8 fps, still ahead by anywhere from 45% to 200%.
I suppose you could give Apple 10% credit seeing how they bought that much of the company that makes them (again, after starting to use their products) but then Intel should get even more credit, because they've owned more, for longer.
Everything I've ever read about Apple's supposed optimizations is that they have to do with power efficiency.
It's a sad day for innovation when patents are worth more than the product they back. Why wouldn't HP kill off webOS? How long would it have taken them to make $7B in profits off of webOS?
And while a few more entrepreneurs getting ground into hamburger by lawyers isn't that big of a concern in the larger scheme of things; it does mean that innovation in the tech sector is tamed and that we lose out on great products that never get a chance to compete in the marketplace.
The patent trolls don't understand detente. They don't understand MAD. They're the real threat, not Apple/Microsoft/Motorola/HTC/whoever.
http://blog.thomsonreuters.com/index.php/mobile-patent-suits...
Regardless, it does seem like they could still make a hefty profit off of selling the patents (and if there's one thing we all need more of, it's patent talk...)
And Palm did in 2003 spun off their operating system (think of the Treo PDA/Smartphones), which was then bought by a japanese company (Access ltd). Microsoft did license last year a few dozen "Palm" patents from them. I guess any valuable patents date from that time frame but are not owned by Palm anymore.
They paid 1.2B to acquire those patents and Palm itself. It seems obvious that the market values those patents at somewhere < 1.2 billion.
Even if they've appreciated of late, their selling price last year is probably a lot more instructive as to their value than "$/patent" in the Motorola deal.
Really? Seriously? Who would buy WebOS today? I'm all ears. I'm sure HP is too. Not only has it failed to gain a foothold under two separate companies, there is no successful licensed (more than $0 cost) mobile OS on the market today. You have two vertically integrated (AAPL and RIMM), and one free one (Android). Windows Phone is not as much of a failure as WebOS, but that doesn't exactly make the job easier for WebOS's next owner. It just means they have to fight even to be #3.
Come to think of it, open sourcing the whole thing could be a good move. It's the Netscape strategy all over again. It wouldn't really make HP any money, though, so they won't.
HP never really tried. $1.2B and then trashing it so quickly? That's not trying.
This was a perfect opportunity to take the time and do it right. A company that was/is good with hardware, now has a great mobile OS. It had some time to take the loss financially with success of other areas (laptops, enterprise software, etc).
I don't use that many apps actually. Typically I just use a web browser, an ssh client (yes I actually SSH out from my phone often), and the odd solitaire card game every once in a while.
woot-offs are where not-so-successful consumer electronics go to die these days (and I say this as a big fan of woot, and bargain basement priced semi-abandoned technology).
The hardware is fine, and the open-source software that would surround such a release would, I'm sure, be awesome. Please, HP?
This would save them from an expensive e-recycling bill.
It would put a lot of now 'open' tablets on the market which would give a huge cadre of people who would give it a shot a chance to do something amazing. It could change the world.
Its a shame that winning the lottery is more likely than this outcome.
I wish Nokia would have bought Palm.
Expect the PC market to be disrupted next by Apple with Macbook Airs sucking up all the profits, and iOS devices crimping unit growth. Who is going to stick their neck out to make single-digit margins on a Windows 8 tablet?
However, in the mid-to-low end, your average Windows machine is still significantly cheaper than a similarly equiped Mac. Expect PCs to still own the low-priced market.
I'm not sure where you get your 'single-digit margins' comment from, but what are the real options for hardware manufacturers? You can't make a product without an OS, and your options are Android and Windows. I for one prefer a Windows device (WP over Android anyway). There is a market.
Dell had $2.9 billion in consumer sales, $ 73 million profit: http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/secure/fiscal12q2_relea...
Meanwhile, PC sales are declining in the U.S. and Europe. So it's a slow/negative growth market with small profits.
Virtually all of the (non-Apple) profit in the PC market accumulates to Microsoft and Intel. Windows costs around $50, that means that even if they could make a tablet as cheaply as Apple, they would still make significantly less profit.
And there is no evidence at all that anyone can compete with the iPad right now.
True. Until the generation who is now about 10 grows up and starts driving the PC buying decisions. They'll have been using tablets for 8 years or so and will think nothing of writing a paper on a tablet (bluetooth keyboards being easily available, although kids who have had smartphones since before puberty may end up being just fine typing everything on touch screens) and consuming all their media on a tablet and their smartphone. No bulky laptop required. What does a laptop add, from the point of view of a consumer? The ability to choose from a wide range of anti-virus software and browser toolbars?
So when they go to college, they will see a bargain basement PC laptop with Windows 10 Home Basic Limited Edition (~$600) or an iPad 11 ($500), or an Android "Vanilla Custard" tablet ($449). Which one will they choose? I don't know, but I know it's not the crappy laptop.
AAPL is positioning themselves in anticipation of that day, I have no doubt about it. They intend the iPad to be the "best" tablet the same way the iPod was the best MP3 player, and by 2007 everyone seemed to own an iPod. Once people are ready to let go of PCs the same way we let go of floppies, CRT monitors, and dial-up modems, they will be positioned as the smart choice.
A couple things I did like about the TouchPad over the iPad: shift key on the keyboard to access special chars easier and downloading apps without being thrown out of the App Store.
“Yeah, but your date has learned a lot from taking people on dates like that and most of that stuff has been fixed. How about another date?”
Not making fun of your factually correct statement, obviously, just pointing out that in many cases you do not get a second chance to make a first impression.
You're picking and choosing a specific example when, if you recall everyone else, it was pretty much the same thing. Buggy software was the sole reason why the TouchPad or even WebOS failed.
This has gone on to be the core of the Apple mobile strategy--they don't worry about being first to market with every feature, rather the biggest concern is not to ship buggy/unreliable stuff that doesn't deliver on its promises. If at all possible.
Apple got to launch their incomplete-but-solid product and then spend a year or two refining it and incrementally adding features. That's the advantage of redefining/creating the market you launch in though, it doesn't extend to anyone else.
For anyone trying to compete with them now, they have to hit the ground running with a comparable-or-better feature set (which I assume is why Android vendors make so much fuss about Flash) _and_ comparable polish.
"Sole reason" I can't agree with, but WebOS has bugs that's for sure. I bought an HP Veer around Week 1. Last month I went back to my iPhone4 and I wouldn't go back (even before this announcement).
The Veer lags sometimes, for no obvious reason. Touches often register with the droplet effect, but fail to actually trigger the button you clearly hit. The Palm account had no way to update it online (better not forget to update your CC# before a purchase or you've effectively bricked the app-market). Mail was laggy, and seemed to rarely update properly. I couldn't have both my Work GoogleApps Mail, and my regular GMail on the phone as GMail accounts. I had to setup my personal account as an Exchange account.
None of these were instant deal-breakers, but with no updates, no fixes, and no communication I got tired of waiting for a fix that may never come.
Of course the app-store/market/whatever kinda sucked too.
My biggest peeve was copy & paste. Mentioned in another reply, but before the 2G iPhone I never had a real need for copy & paste since there weren't really worthwhile apps to copy & paste between on the feature-phones back then.
The WebOS copy/paste however absolutely sucks. It's tricky, I never remembered if it's Option+C or gesture-area+C no matter how many times I did it.
Oh, and the Veer screen was OK for most stuff, but waaay too small for web-browsing without Android's ability to re-flow text on zoom.
Signed, -A Guy With A Veer Sitting On The Shelf
Along with patches, it is quite smooth indeed. Of course, the argument can and should be made that it should have shipped this way.
It is possible to set up Google Apps and personal Gmail on the same phone. Simply select GMail and enter email addresses with full domain i.e. you@work.com and you@gmail.com
Viola.
I also installed a number of patches from Preware, but nothing to my knowledge really addresses any of these concerns.
The "laggy" effects are software, not CPU. Even another 50% CPU isn't going to help a 3-second pause every time you send an SMS. It isn't going to prevent clearly software related bugs in the Mail app. It's also not going to make the buggy software decide to start triggering events on buttons it's clearly already registering (due to the droplet indicator on taps).
It's not going to make copy/paste as smooth as a double-tap, drag a point to highlight selection, tap "Copy" and done. Honestly I never did figure out the way to highlight the selection I wanted consistently. I'm pretty sure text-selections are not an OS-wide feature.
Even if in the past 30 days community patches came out to address all these issues (I seriously doubt it), who wants to depend on the grace of others for a product you just paid $250 for a couple months ago when the company that sold you the product is more interested in releasing and patching/updating a tablet?
Add to that no Pre3, the 2.1, 2.2, 3.0 fragmentation, and it was clear that without some major, visible effort on HP's part the Veer was already dead.
Plus the damn phone doesn't provide an option to keep the screen off on the Touchstone charger without a community patch. That issue has been around since my old Pre Minus! Seriously WebOS? 9 out of 10 smartphone owners I know use their phone as their alarm clock. I don't want a damn flashlight to turn on 12" from my head on my nightstand at 3AM because I got an automated email. If it's not a SMS or Phone Call, turn off and stay off when I push the Lock button.
The one redeeming application on the app-store was the Remix music player. First non-iPhone music player I could get behind (I used to own a Nexus S, never found anything on Android that seemed to focus on the simple act of browsing your music library quickly and just playing). HP should've bought the app and replaced their ugly WinAmp3/Win95 era junk with it. :-) Too late now...
HP also bungled by not offering a 7" model, and not competing on price from the very beginning, even if it meant running at a loss to chase market share.
Here was the original email:
Hello,
I am part of Hewlett-Packard’s Business Development team that focuses on engaging one-on-one in strategic relationships with leading partners for webOS app opportunities.
I wanted to touch base with you to see how things were going with your "APP NAME REDACTED", and also discuss with you our plans for HP’s upcoming webOS tablet launch.
If you have some time, it would be great to connect to share where we are headed, and also hear more about your mobile strategy.
Let me know when you’d be available and I can schedule a call- I hope to speak with you soon.