Way back in August of last year, when temperatures were above zero and Honeycomb was still a great unknown, HP promised us the first webOS tablet will come “in early 2011.” Just yesterday, however, our noteworthy exposure of the vanguard members of the webOS tablet family led us to believe that at least one of them, the Opal, would take until September to arrive. That may still be the case, but DigiTimes is bringing us back around to HP’s original pledge, with word that Inventec has received instructions from HP to start producing and shipping a webOS slate (most probably the Topaz) in March. As usual, this comes from the (in)famous insider sources that tend to miss as often as they hit, but it does make sense for HP to follow up its February event with a relatively rapid product rollout.
Look, let’s be real: our Palm tablet scoop today was awesome. For its part, though, HP wants to remind us all that it’s got other news in the pipe for its event early next month, going so far as to tease invitees that they haven’t seen the latest on Engadget.
Not to say that we won’t be trying very, very hard to ensure that our readers do see the latest right here… but point taken, HP. See you in a couple weeks.
Enjoy your brief tablet vacation while it lasts. It’s a nice, brief respite from the flurry that produced 80+ tablets at CES the other week, and will continue to manifest itself in offerings from a number of manufacturers both large and small. It seems safe to assume that we can expect new tablets from companies like Apple and HP in the near future.
HP’s entry is expected to surface on February 9th, during an already-announced press conference. The company is likely to show off some of the fruits of its Palm acquisition via a number of new pieces of hardware for the “Something big, Something small, Something beyond” event. The above tablet is expected to be in the mix. It’s apparently a rendering of the Topaz device, courtesy of an Engadget “tipster.”
The tablet completely lacks buttons on its face and features a front facing camera, a micro-USB port, and three built-in speakers, according to the site.
Oh, hello. A trusted tipster just sent in these internal renders of HP / Palm’s “Topaz” webOS tablet, which is one of two tablets currently being developed in Sunnyvale. That’s right, two tablets: the 9-inch Topaz and a 7-inch model codnamed Opal — a lineup that fits nicely into Palm’s “Something big, Something small, Something beyond” tagline for its upcoming February 9th event. Looking at the render, we’re seeing the no-button design we’d previously heard about (we’re assuming the gesture area rotates with the display), a front-facing camera, a micro USB port on the bottom, and what appears to be a Vizio Tablet-style three speaker arrangement for stereo audio in both landscape and portrait modes — that’s two speakers along the left side and a third on the right. (That’s just a guess, though.) We’d also note the back appears to be a glossy material, which might rule out a giant Touchstone for charging — Touchstone backs have heretofore been soft-touch, but anything can change, we suppose.
We’re told that units will start to arrive at Palm HQ in June as production ramps up for launch later this year — a timeline backed up by an internal marketing slide we received that lists WiFi-only, AT&T 3G, and Verizon LTE versions of the Opal arriving in September 2011, and on AT&T LTE in July 2012. The slide also indicates the Opal will have a particular e-reading focus, which makes sense for a 7-inch device, and there’s a mention of “premium audio,” which nicely reinforces our speaker hypothesis. Unfortunately, we don’t have any word on specs or pricing yet, but these things had better be packing some serious heat for cheap if Palm is really planning to wait until September to launch them — they’ll be going head-to-head with the Xoom, the PlayBook, and presumably the iPad 2. We’re still digging for more, so keep an eye out — things are going to get crazy leading up to February 9th.
Update: We’re told that they both have unspecified 1.2GHz processors, and that Topaz may arrive before Opal. We’ll let you know if we learn anything else.
Todd Bradley did promise us there’d be more than just slates on HP’s webOS menu and today we can add netbooks to the list of form factors for Palm’s famed OS. This heretofore unknown slice of info comes from a carrier training website HP has set up to educate resellers on the strong points of its forthcoming products. The training video on the site speaks of the great synergies that can result from smartphones, slates and netbooks all running the same OS and “speaking” to one another, which echoes Bradley’s “connected experience” mantra from a couple of days ago. Smartphones are said to be the beginning of a new family of webOS products, with their larger siblings set to come “soon enough.” Is February 9th soon enough? We’d say so.
A leaked preview of upcoming Android 3.0 release (aka Honeycomb) dropped last week on the Android developers’ YouTube channel. We certainly noticed, and of course the scrutiny of the drastically different UI began shortly thereafter.
Google’s official preview video (above) provides us with the most in-depth look we’ve seen of the OS since Google’s VP of engineering Andy Rubin gave us a sneak peek of it in December. It’s too preliminary to make any absolute judgments, but from what little we’ve gleaned from the video, there are a number of pretty big changes. It’s a complete interface makeover.
After Apple’s runaway success with its 2010 debut of the iPad, expectations on tablet offerings from competing companies in 2011 have been high. And at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, there was certainly no dearth of new tablet debuts. Estimates of the number of new tablets showcased at CES ranged in the 50s to the 80s. From what we understand, the Honeycomb operating system has been designed to take advantage of the tablet shape in particular.
What hasn’t been made clear yet, however, is whether or not Honeycomb will be a tablet-exclusive version, or whether it will also be available for phones.
Android UI director Matias Duarte speaks to the issue, however effusively, in an interview with Engadget: “What you see in Honeycomb is absolutely the direction for Android,” Duarte says when directly asked about portability.
From what we can see in the new video, Duarte’s influence on the new UI is palpable. He came to Google in May from HP-owned Palm, where he developed the webOS interface for Palm devices, seen below:
Duarte’s scrollable page widgets from the webOS interface above are reminiscent of those seen on Honeycomb in the recent video from Google:
The Rubin demo screen shot and the screen above grab from Google’s leaked video share the same minimalist aesthetic, even more so than “Froyo” version 2.2 seen on Samsung’s Galaxy Tab (an OS which Duarte had no part in creating).
Surface area is obviously greater when moving from a 4-inch smartphone screen to that of a 10-inch tablet, and the scrollable Gmail, calendar and browser bookmark widgets sitting side-by-side simultaneously make good use of the increase in screen size.
Another stark difference: the complete lack of physical buttons on the device itself. “With Honeycomb,” says Duarte in the Engadget interview, “you don’t need to have physical buttons.” Note their complete absence in the wide shot of the Xoom:
Instead, physical navigational buttons have been replaced with on-screen versions of themselves, as seen in the arrows in the Xoom’s bottom left-hand corner, while the full app menu is still accessible in the upper right-hand corner:
But manufacturers aren’t beholden to buttonless devices. “Our partners can take that and do what they want with it,” Duarte says in the Engadget interview. “If somebody feels that, for their application, physical buttons are absolutely the right thing to do? Great. They can do that.”
Other app demos in the video seemed relatively straightforward, with heavier emphasis on their tablet application. Google Books leverages the tablet’s shape for page-turning and reading purposes, much like opening an iBook on the iPad. Gmail interactivity remains similar to its “Gingerbread” application — scrollable inbox, no-frills white-and-gray color scheme — but is now separated into two columns for navigability’s sake.
We do love to hear from loquacious execs, and HP’s Todd Bradley has been the very definition of one in an interview conducted with CNBC during CES. In a discussion revolving around webOS, Bradley was asked how HP intends to differentiate itself from the iPad and improve upon it, to which he quipped, “you and I will talk about that on the 9th.” If that’s not a confirmation that we’ll finally have our unicorn of a webOS tablet next month, we don’t know what is. Even more encouraging is the implication further on in the interview that HP could have debuted this slate at CES, but opted to do an unveiling at a separate event so as to properly highlight just how awesome it is. But wait, there’s yet more good news for webOS fans: Bradley’s crew sees its upcoming tablet as just “one piece” of the connected experience that is the company’s goal and we’re promised to be enlightened about a broad range of webOS devices at the February 9th event in San Francisco, though the lack of any Palm namedrops seems to suggest they might not bear the name of their maker. Even if they’re called iPaqs, we just want to see them already!
See that image above? It’s not a forthcoming Palm LTE phone for Verizon Wireless, but it could be a sneak peek into Big Red’s plans for the future. If you’ll recall, VZW’s CTO Tony Malone hinted last week at CES that integrated LTE voice + data wouldn’t come until 2012 or 2013 at the earliest, and for now, all LTE devices would be relying on 3G for voice and 4G for data. Heck, not even all of the first-wave LTE devices will support simultaneous 4G data + 3G voice. Of course, we all know that LTE voice is coming eventually, and a new test portal at Verizon’s official website may be a clue as to how things will be arranged once it’s live. We’re guessing that an admin simply populated this page with information and images from the standard Pre Plus page — there’s no way an LTE-enabled Pre is planning to slink into VZW’s lineup — but it’s pretty obvious that at least someone within the company is thinking about a world where voice calls are completed over LTE. Potentially more interesting is the “4G plan pricing on this phone” line — during Verizon’s second LTE presser at CES, none of the executives on stage would talk dollars and cents, but this makes it fairly clear that there will definitely be separate plans for 4G phones, most likely ones with higher prices. Feel free to hit the source link if you’d like to poke around, but we wouldn’t expect it to remain online for much longer. One more look is after the break.
Update: As we predicted, the page has been pulled. Good thing the important bits are right here for you and yours.
The news we were all hoping for finally hit this week: HP is getting ready to show off its new webOS-based tablet.
Sadly for those of us in Las Vegas, it’s not going to happen at the Consumer Electronics Show here. Instead, HP’s planning an “exciting webOS announcement” for February 9 in San Francisco.
The invitations (shown above) went out today, and while they don’t mention a tablet, it’s a good bet that a webOS-based slate will be on the agenda — plus, perhaps, HP-branded successors to Palm’s tepidly successful webOS-based smartphones, the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi.
Hewlett-Packard acquired Palm in 2010 for about $1.2 billion, a purchase that more or less saved Palm from yet another ignominious decline into obscurity, but left many observers wondering what HP was thinking.
The Palm and Pre (and their successors, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus) were ambitious attempts to compete with Android phones and the iPhone, and the phones offer striking industrial design, elegant user interfaces, clever multitasking and a web-based development environment.
But the phones haven’t proven popular with consumers, thanks in part to poor battery life and the relative lack of webOS applications.
HP’s intentions became clearer in July, 2010, when HP CTO Phil McKinney started promising a webOS-based tablet and webOS-based printer to come in “early 2011.” For such devices, a lightweight, web-based mobile operating system makes a lot of sense, and competitors have less of a head start than in the smartphone market.
With the next big thing out of Sunnyvale just weeks away, it’s hard to believe anyone much cares about about the Pre 2 at this point — but for what it’s worth, Walmart’s now pimping the Verizon-flavored version of the phone on its LetsTalk-powered website for a release at some indeterminate point in the future. Interestingly, the news of a February webOS event hosted by HP ties in nicely with a recent rumor on PhoneArena that suggests Big Red’s Pre 2 will live a very short retail life starting later this month as HP transitions into “its own line of webOS handsets,” which could very well be what these guys want to show off next month. Might we have a Kin-style collectors’ item in the making?
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