HP Hints Again at Return to Smartphone Market

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Honis

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HP WebOS released 1 phone (veer) and 1 tablet (Touchpad). One is not several. The Pre 3 was never officially launched, however the inventory was ready to sell so it was released to wholesalers after Leo started the fire sale.

Palm released "several" WebOS phones if 3 phones and 2 slightly upgraded phones is considered several.
 

sundragon

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We studied this in Business school. The problem is no money in printers (any more) - Companies need to bring disruptive tech to the market. Examples: BBerry, iPhone, IBM PC, iPod, Open Source - All of these technologies were not bleeding edge but a combination of tech that were disruptive when launched and changed the market. The key is to keep doing it - reinventing your business to stay valid and competitive.

HP managed to do this quite successfully over it's long history but like IBM is slowly becoming a giant beast that can't turn fast enough.

 

razor512

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If they can make an android smartphone and tablet but with the webOS 3.x keybooard, then they will easily be able to beat many other devices on the market.

Bring the webOS multitasking to android will also be great.

Compared to all other mobile OS, webOS 3.x has the best multitasking and keyboard. Running apps stay in the cards and the OS cannot auto close them, meaning no launching a program and then going into another program or game, only to find your office application auto closed without saving your work (even though it's icon is still in view on the andrid app switcher menu)

webOS will just push some data to swap space, and if there is still not enough free RAM, it will pop up a message so you can go to the application yourself and save your work and give the application a graceful shutdown. (just like on many desktop PC's running a full OS)

The keyboard has all of the right buttons in the main view (including a half height number row, and if you want, some arrow keys on either side of the number row)

here is a screenshot I took a while back

http://i.imgur.com/3zgcIoR.png

android, please add the webOS keyboard, and proper multitasking where if I launch a program, it should never be auto closed to save memory, if more memory is needed then tell me and I will choose what to close.

WebOS failed because it did not have many applications and promoted monetization so heavily that there were hardly any free apps, and for what little was free, most were crappy practice apps (eg, random unit converters and other small apps that a new programmer would make for a class assignment)

This made it have a lot of trouble competing with other mature platforms with free alternatives for what ever was being charged for in the webOS app store.

 

GreaseMonkey_62

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HP could have made webOS worked, but the CEO at the time wanted to get out of consumer hardware and when it didn't launch that well, he was quick to shelve it. Thereby blowing billions of dollars.
 
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