HP TouchPad Offers iPad a Serious Competitor
Posted On Thursday, February 10, 2011 at at 3:45 PM by Dianne Kennedyi M back in Chicago after a week’s vacation in wonderfully warm Hawaii. No new publishing technologies to report on from that sunny location!
Big news yesterday was the HP announcements from Herbst Pavilion at Fort Mason Center on the north side of San Francisco. Of particular interest to my followers was the announcement of the new HP TouchPad. While we have been hoping for the rumored announcement of the iPad2, HP has stolen the spotlight with TouchPad.
The good news is that HP TouchPad mimics the iPad with a 9.7-inch 1024 by 768 display. But TouchPad surprises the market by using neither an Android Honeycomb nor Windows 7 OS. TouchPad boasts the HP webOS. According to Jon Rubinstein, former president of Palm and current leader of HP's WebOS efforts, "What sets the TouchPad apart right from the start is the WebOS interface. WebOS for tablets is slightly different, with organizational features and the same multitasking system used on WebOS smartphones.” HP webOS is a proprietary mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel, initially developed by Palm and purchased by Hewlett Packard (HP) in 2010 So in addition to iOS, Android and Windows7, publishers targeting tablets will now have to add HP webOS to their development agenda.
The HP TouchPad, like the multitudes of tablet PCs announced at CES 2011, makes improvements on what iPad offers. Although TouchPad appears to fall into the Office Tablet market segment, it also boasts superior audio (Beat Audio technology) and video calling to enable gaming. HP is also offering a serious alternative to the iPad for delivering magazines. Time Inc. will be among the first to deliver editions of Time Magazine to this promising new tablet.
