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POLL: When *Should* HPalm Launch Their webOS Tablet?

By: , 1/19/2011 10:03 am | 32 comments

As can be expected in the wake of device leak photos, launch date rumors have begun to swirl around the interwebs. First Engadget told us that the Topaz would likely launch in June, with the smaller Opal launching as late as September. And just last night, we were tipped about a DigiTimes account that claims the first webOS tablets will ship as early as March of this year.

That’s right, March. DigiTimes says HP claims they will ship 45-48 million notebooks, with webOS tablets being the main thrust of their sales. We’re still of the “seeing is believing” mindset – DigiTimes has been off the mark more than once in the past. Still, this timeframe would fit right in line with HP’s claim that tablets would be made available in “early 2011″ (yes HP, we still remember).

So which is it? March… or June/September? More importantly, which would be the preferred launch date? Our knee-jerk reaction is that a tablet needs to be launched yesterday. But think about it for a second. Should HP launch a device with an unknown OS and an SDK that’s not yet publicly available? How much of a window does HP have to release a fully-baked device complete with hardware, accessory, and software partners? Perhaps a comprehensive media consumption ecosystem? This stuff is all just as important (if not more) than sexy new hardware. If it ain’t ready, webOS may not stand much of a chance. P.S. And HP, we know tablets are all the rage right now but… any chance we’ll see drool-worthy webOS smartphones Feb 9th?

So? What do YOU guys think? Let us know…


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About Dan Ramirez

Dan is a senior editor at webOSroundup. He is a physician in South Texas with an unbridled passion for webOS. He is very active on Twitter (@vara411) and enjoys engaging the webOS community.
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  • Notalexrz

    they should release it next friday….cuz that’s when I get my income tax :)

    • Kennith Jackson

      Though I love my palm pre and it’s way cool WebOs, going for the HP connectivity game is a big risk with most carriers like O2 cutting service speeds that keep my smart phone from from being a truly good experience I.e., such as not being able to use Youtube or any other video or music service to most on-line activity painfully dragging (making cloud storage and retreaval too slow for practicle use).

    • Kennith Jackson

      Though I love my palm pre and it’s way cool WebOs, going for the HP connectivity game is a big risk with most carriers like O2 cutting service speeds that keep my smart phone from from being a truly good experience I.e., such as not being able to use Youtube or any other video or music service to most on-line activity painfully dragging (making cloud storage and retreaval too slow for practicle use).

  • Anonymous

    I think it is imperative that HP release some form of new hardware immediately. The longer they wait the more customers and mind share they loose.

    • http://www.webosroundup.com/ DanR

      Why didn’t cha vote, then? :p

      • Anonymous

        because for some strange reason when I wrote that there was no poll! Could it be that you slipped it in under my nose?

    • http://www.hpalmnews.com HPalm News

      HP isn’t losing customers. This isn’t Palm anymore and for that matter Palm doesn’t have many customers. I think it is best for them to launch now, but not because they are going to lose customers if they don’t. Mainly because I want one tomorrow and because I think it is best for them to be pushing the envelope. If they are going to follow this up with more devices in the next few months, there needs to be a wave of activity. Developers of substance just won’t get on board until there are enough devices to make it worth their time. If HP brings this device and follows it up with some nice software updates quickly, there will be not be a need to wait for software, it will happen quickly.

      I just don’t get this argument that they are losing mindshare. They have none as a webOS maker, but they have volumes as HP. Yesterday’s news on Engadget was a reminder to tech people that webOS still exists. The rest of the world is still clueless. Until someone on the nightly news is comparing the webOS tablet with an iPad after a customer just saw an ad demonstrating multitasking on the Topaz, there will be no mindshare for a webOS tablet. There is a small, very small amount of mindshare for webOS right now, but it is about 1/1000th of what the iPhone or Android have. HP on the other hand is a household name almost. Mindshare won’t grow for webOS until people start connecting the two and seeing advertising explaining them.

      • http://www.hpalmnews.com HPalm News

        Why does Disqus lose my comment everytime I reply to a post? If I comment then post the comment then refresh the page it is just gone.

        Extremely frustrating and seems to only happen on webosroundup.

        Anyways, i had posted this article

        http://www.changewaveresearch.com/articles/2010/07/smart_phones_20100714.html

        Shows that webOS has no mindshare. My only point was that I would prefer HP wait and execute well then worry about the mindshare that they don’t have with Palm and webOS

        • http://www.webosroundup.com/ DanR

          Hmm… we’d had that problem in the past but have not heard of any recurrences. If this turns out to be a trend for other folks we’ll most certainly look into it. Sorry about that!

          • http://www.hpalmnews.com HPalm News

            yeah, it seems to happen a lot to me. I think it is because I post and then end up replying to my own comment. Then I refresh to see them both posted.

            I think the workflow is like this – Post original comment, DON’T refresh, post reply, refresh and the reply doesn’t show up.

            Sorry for the frustration. Your blog is fantastic and I love the comment system and how seemless the integration with Disqus is. However, that issue can get really frustrating when you write a reply that is fairly long and then can’t recover it at all :(

  • http://twitter.com/Osiris_C3 Scott Dillenbeck

    I agree with wusaint. Time is not only money but its mindshare as well. If they can get a launch in March I will let out a big sigh of relief. If its June I will be a bit worried. September? Panic.

  • leerad

    I love the tablets, but I need a new phone and I want it to be powered by webOS. I really hope phones are not on the back-burner while tablets are being pushed. It’s time for HP to release a few pics of upcoming smartphones.

    • http://www.webosroundup.com/ DanR

      I have a feeling that tablets and phones are merely PARTS of the puzzle, here. I’m hopeful that HP has found a way to link devices together somehow to make us want the WHOLE EXPERIENCE rather than just separate devices. Of course, my wallet is whimpering as we speak!

  • http://twitter.com/dvdmon Levi Wallach

    You need another category – by end of March. HP can distinguish itself from it’s competition in a number of ways – it already has a superior OS, but the gap is starting to shrink (look at Android 3.0). It’ll be hard to one-up Apple (or even Motorola) in hardware, but maybe there. Another is price point, a third is (at least for this round) beating others to the punch. Oh yeah, there’s also the whole ecosystem thing. Generally if it fails to be competative in any of these items it loses, but even with a competative product it needs to overcome the traction already out there, and it won’t do that by showing up AFTER some or most of the competition is out. March is really the latest it should come out, but I’d even shoot for right after the Feb 09 announcement. At least then people will be hard-pressed to compare a unit actually selling in stores with ones that are months away, no matter how they look in prototype form… Software is critical too, of course. HP can’t make a choice between hardware and software, it needs to have both ready as soon as possible. If software isn’t ready, they lose, if hardware isn’t ready, they can’t even play. They have to make it happen, whatever the cost. Smartphones are in a different place now, but if it wants to be one of the big 2 or 3 in tablets, it needs to be out before April…

  • Anonymous

    March for 9inch slate. DO IT.

  • Anonymous

    March for 9inch slate. DO IT.

  • AAM

    I agree, this is not a question of either “take all the time you need for a perfect product” or “don’t worry about the detail, just get it out now”. HP needs to find a good balance between meeting the market demand for the tablet now (or WebOS tablets will become vaporware and loose out all together), and market demand for a properly baked product (or the product will backfire).

    But taking a hint from Apple and others, I bet that the prototypes of the tablet(s) have not been confined to HP labs, and we might well see compelling software from third parties being demo’d on the 9th. Given HPs enterprise connections, there will likely be some corporate software or service for sure, but also very likely a few games and other apps that have been adopted for WebOs tablets – either from the Pre or from other platforms, and maybe some are brand new. And again, going by what Apple has done in the past, the development environment need not be in final release for these apps to be complete and ready.

    The WebOs for tablets need not be perfectly finished, so long as it does not have too many rough edges and no major shortcomings. At the end of the day, software upgrades are just to get rid of these rough edges, right? Let’s just hope the hardware design is good. The renderings on Engadget look like over sized Pre’s without the keyboard slider. Yes they somehow look far better – perhaps because of their size and thin-ness, but they are only renders…

  • Joseph Ziehm

    About the same time they release the vaporware product of WebOS 2.0 to the Pixi users. Getting very tired of prolonged release dates. HP should have fired every useless sap which led Palm down the dark hole. In emailing HP they refused to send a beta which means for all the hype there’s no screen shots released even on beta testing.

    • Joseph

      HP has turned this into a farce. I am quite uncertain that webOS 2.x.y will be equally applicable to Pixi screens and tablets; there’s a big gap between optimization for these two sizes. I am starting to think that the delay on current phones relates to problems that go way beyond market timing, and get to problems that may indeed result in Pixi upgrading being vaporware. HP can prove us wrong, but they have taken too long for this adverse outcome not to be entering people’s minds. And if they dont get it out for Pixi and Pre, as a consequence of there will be no 45 million webOS tablet sales, because every launch review will highlight that broken commitment.

  • ReaganElephant

    I don’t like either option. They need to launch before the Playbook and ALL of the big-name Apps. They need to pay the devs for the top 100 iPhone apps to make them for webOS. Here’s to hoping that they already have and the launch partners will be revieled on Feb 9, too.

    • http://www.webosroundup.com/ DanR

      Well, that would have been an obvious answer though, don’t you think? If I had posted “have both software and hardware ready to fly by this Friday” it would have garnered 100% of the vote, no doubt. The point here is to ask which philosophy folks ascribe to: do you want to see a tablet NOW before many of the i’s are dotted and t’s crossed, or a more finished ecosystem? It would seem folks so far are just starving for new hardware. Also surprising is the large number of folks who don’t much care about tablets and are more preoccupied with the devices we carry around with us daily: smartphones! I think I may be in the latter group.

  • ReaganElephant

    correction: I don’t like either option. They need to launch before the Playbook and launch with ALL of the big-name Apps. They need to pay the devs for the top 100 iPhone apps to make them for webOS. Here’s to hoping that they already have and the launch partners will be revieled on Feb 9, too.

  • jbrandonf

    If its coming in a month and a half then they need to start marketing NOW. Who cares if you want them to wait, fine, but get round about what it could be like the first ads for the Moto Droid. I’m so done with HP & Palm, they simply do not know how to create hype, and it’ll lead to an undoubtedly great product that underperforms because they don’t know the of marketing.

    • http://www.webosroundup.com/ DanR

      A valid point. There are those who argue that HP does not play the game that way but I feel they (and anyone else in this field) need to. As fast as the PC market moves, the mobile computing market is evolving much quicker and needs to be hitched to a super-duper fast hype machine. Let’s hope HP’s seen the writing on the wall and will give us a media blitz that eclipses the likes of Microsoft… because in my opinion, even half a billion bucks of advertising won’t get you in the door.

  • jbrandonf

    *don’t know the IMPORTANCE of marketing is what I meant to say.

  • Terry

    There is no point in launching if they do not have apps people want to use. I want skype running, I want sling running, I want F1 app running.
    I hope HP has all the companies making a webos versions of their apps. I want to watch my recording of basketball games over the internet on my pre etc…..

  • http://twitter.com/AboutwebOS AboutwebOS

    I don’t see a poll to answer, so I’ll just say: I’d love to have a tablet to play with in March (which would make a great birthday gift), but I don’t think that webOS is quite ready for it nor will the ecosystem be much developed by then. It would be an interesting experience, but nowhere near where it will be, say, Q1 2012. Does that mean that HP shouldn’t release anything at all? I’d say, no: get some good hardware out there, make the experience decent if not great, and we’ll be getting somewhere.

  • Joseph

    This is a well timed leak. That’s all it is, a well timed leak. Until they sort out the document problems, with a comprehensive solution, anything they try to sell will do less than the iPAD or the Galaxy (or the numerous other devices.) Document capabilty on theses other platforms is usable but NOT great. weOS has a chance if its greatest weakness (sh@tty document handling) became it differential strong point.

  • protofa

    hp needs a tablet like a whore needs a tampon. they better have one fast, or things will start to get very messy.

  • Al

    I am sick of the BS !

    June comes and no new phone with top notch hardware and I buy an Evo 4g …….

    A tablet is great but what about all of us who have had a Pre since 2009 ???

  • John K.

    June,june,june!!! That’s when my 2 yrs of PRE 1 contract is up. Still using the original phone I purchased in 09 with the same battery. I wanna slap my phone and tablet together just once and see if they break. Could I get the 7″ or 9″ tablet as a phone too please

  • Terry

    When will I be able to watch sky news like they can on the iPhone. Are HPalm talking with sky, cbs etc….