“HP’s WebOS team almost certainly had an idea that the company’s new tablet, the TouchPad, had very little chance of challenging Apple’s dominance in the tablet market, as the company’s webOS operating system was running ‘over twice as fast’ on its rival’s iPad 2 tablet, a source close to the subject revealed to The Next Web,” Matt Brian reports for TNW.
“With HP announcing it is to cease development of its webOS devices, we learned that before the HP’s TouchPad tablet and Pre smartphones were even released, everyone within the webOS team ‘wanted them gone,'” Brian reports. “The hardware reportedly stopped the team from innovating beyond certain points because it was slow and imposed constraints, which was highlighted when webOS was loaded on to Apple’s iPad device and found to run the platform significantly faster than the device for which it was originally developed.”
Advertisement: Limited Time: Students, Parents and Faculty save up to $200 on a new Mac.
Brian reports, “With a focus on web technologies, webOS could be deployed in the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser as a web-app; this produced similar results, with it running many times faster in the browser than it did on the TouchPad.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Opportun” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
More blood on Apple iPhone’s and iPad’s touchscreens: HP discontinues webOS phones, tablets – August 18, 2011
Unhappy Best Buy wants HP to take back non-selling TouchPads – August 17, 2011
As Apple iPads sell like hotcakes, mountains of unsold tablets pile up in channel – August 15, 2011
People don’t want fake iPads, they want real Apple iPads; HP slashes TouchPad dud by 20% – August 12, 2011
HP TouchPad hits Australia with a resounding ‘meh’ – July 27, 2011
HP bumps Rubinstein from webOS lead after TouchPad launch failure – July 11, 2011
Rubinstein addresses poor HP TouchPad reviews, compares webOS to Apple’s early Mac OS X – July 5, 2011
HP fiddles while Apple innovates – July 10, 2011
Rubinstein addresses poor HP TouchPad reviews, compares webOS to Apple’s early Mac OS X – July 5, 2011
HP TouchPad simply cannot compete with Apple’s iPad 2 – July 5, 2011
Pogue reviews HP TouchPad: ‘Doesn’t come close’ to Apple’s iPad – June 30, 2011
Mossberg: HP TouchPad ‘simply no match’ for Apple iPad 2 – June 30, 2011
Google should’ve bought web OS instead of Motorola.
…well, that’s embarrassing.
Apple is far far ahead and testing and planning light years beyond everybody else. HP, biggest PC maker, cannot compete. May this bury the “toy” and “spec” asinine remarks once and for all.
It won’t help. Jackasses never learn. Even as Apple temporarily took the top market cap spot, there were idiots still calling Apple a “toy” company as absurd as it may sound. In my knowledge, I doubt that any “toy” company has ever been one of the wealthiest companies on the planet.
To tech-heads specs are everything. Even if none of those exceptional specs begets a good overall product, the tech-heads will be happy. Tech-heads don’t seem to be interested in well-balanced products because it just doesn’t excite them enough. A tech-head believes that the better the specs, the better the product. It makes some sense in theory, but there are too many factors to stop that from working in reality. It’s tight integration between all the features that really matters. How well the features mesh with ease of use and such. Maybe a tech-head doesn’t care about those things, but consumers do and Apple understands that much.
I remember when Nokia was putting those 12 MP Carl Zeiss lenses on their N8s. Tech-heads were going crazy with excitement but the N8 was probably the worst-selling smartphone Nokia ever built since the rest of the smartphone was crap. That’s tech-heads for ya. A company should never let a tech-head do product planning.
Tiny 12 MP sensors perform worse than same size 6 MP sensors. Tech-heads who believe otherwise, have nothing to do with photography.
“Toy” company is actually an unintentional compliment as it encapsulates how Apple makes complex technology simple and appliance-like – like child’s play!
Probably ran twice as fast, trying to get away.
Windows runs faster on macs…
When will the industry learn 😉
I call this BS. Since webOS is designed to work on the Qualcomm chip only how did they get it to run on ARM architecture? I would love to see the proof of this ridiculous speculation by the Internet hit whores. Not that I doubt it could run better. But, how could this claim be even possible. Especially since HP has used ARM architecture in the past. If it would have been possible they could have switched easily.
Apple made Mac OS X processor independent in the beginning, WebOS was started by a bunch of Apple defectors.
Figure it out…….
My thoughts.
Any OS needs a kernel written for the specific processor (CPU) All the other software layered on top then just needs to be recompiled for the processor being used.
So I call BS on this too; HP would have to have an aRM kernel for WebOS.
I read somewhere this morning that WebOS was ported to Apple’s latest chip and a third chip.
They ran webOS on the iPad 2.
Management sure screwed over the Touch Pad crew.
Your comment is BS. Apple, Qualcomm, TI, Navida, Samsung, etc all license from ARM. It is the same architecture, just different implementation. No problem running application across platforms.
If HP continues this way, ignoring technical competance, its whole business is doomed to be sold off.
Why didn’t HP pre-order 275,000 iPads from Best Buy and load webOS on top and sell that as the TouchPad? Better use of money than 200,000 returned tablets left unsold on the shelves.
Because Samsung already patented that idea?
Samsung patented, amongst other things, the photocopier, which has running solidly non-stop now since 2007.
ive said it before
Thank you for pointing that out.
Just as I thought. HP and all of Apple’s competitors obviously have labs full of iPads being reverse engineered.