Hasta La Gadget!

We may have to wait until summer to purchase a webOS slate, but it won’t be summer’s end — PreCentral reports that the company has confirmed a June release date for the HP TouchPad. At the enterprise-oriented HP Summit in San Francisco, CEO Leo Apotheker finally offered the month of release, and also reportedly said that the company’s full-force webOS on PC initiative will begin in a humble way — the beta will run in a web browser, and we’ll see it by the end of the year.

HP TouchPad coming June, webOS for PC beta by year’s end originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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WebOS revolves around a user interface called "Cards." Hit the physical Home button, and each app currently running is displayed in a small Card window. Swipe left or right to switch between the Cards. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

HP claims all its PCs will ship with the WebOS mobile operating system in addition to Microsoft’s Windows sometime next year, according to a report.

That’s an ambitious plan, considering that HP hasn’t even announced a ship date for the WebOS-powered TouchPad tablet yet.

The purpose of the expansion to PCs would be to entice software developers to build apps for the WebOS ecosystem, according to Bloomberg, which originally reported the story. If WebOS is on HP PCs in addition to tablets and smartphones, third-party developers would have a bigger audience for selling apps.

“You create a massive platform,” Leo Apotheker, HP’s new CEO, said in an interview buried deep inside a wordy Bloomberg story.

In terms of apps, HP’s WebOS definitely has some catching up to do. Apple’s iOS is nearing 400,000 apps in the App Store, and Google’s Android has about 250,000. HP’s WebOS has 6,000 apps.

HP acquired Palm last year for the WebOS smartphone operating system. Last month the company introduced the first tablet running WebOS, dubbed the TouchPad. The 9.7-inch tablet is very similar to Apple’s iPad. HP has not announced a price tag or a ship date for the TouchPad.

It’s no surprise that HP has plans to roll WebOS into PCs as well. Research firm DisplaySearch found that in the fourth quarter of 2010, Apple surpassed HP for the No.1  spot in the “mobile PC market,” when you combine sales of Mac notebooks with the iPad. So with the iPad included, Apple sold 10.2 million, or 17.2 percent of, mobile computers during the fourth quarter of 2010. HP shipped 9.3 million notebooks.

Apple is taking a very similar approach with its PCs. Steve Jobs has said the next version of the Mac operating system, OS Lion, will blend traits of iOS into OS X. Ahead of OS Lion’s release,  Apple has launched an App Store for the Mac.

In other words, HP is basically mimicking Apple’s verticalized mobile strategy by cultivating and expanding on an in-house mobile ecosystem rather than solely relying on Microsoft, which has not yet announced a credible tablet strategy.

See Also:

• Why WebOS Hasn’t Lived Up to Its Potential — Yet
• Report: HP’s WebOS Tablet Specs Leaked
• HP Launches WebOS-Powered Tablet, Phones
• WebOS Apps Stand Out Because There’s Less Competition

New Chrome OS update finally fixes the Cr-48’s touchpad issues originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Mar 2011 01:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s not rare to hear talk of other operating systems employing webOS-like elements — we’ve been asking to see its elegant notification system in iOS for years — but RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook borrows so heavily from the UI concepts of the software built by Palm and now owned by HP that it could easily be confused for a webOS tablet. It handles multiple concurrent applications using a card view and allows you to shut down unwanted apps by swiping them off the screen, a multitasking implementation that exhibits “uncanny similarities” in HP’s eyes to its own TouchPad tablet. Still, the Hewlett Packard team insist that they’re focused on their own products and will “keep innovating, we’ll keep honing and those guys hopefully will continue to see the value in it and keep following us by about a year.” Ouch.

RIM’s response, as espoused by Jeff McDowell, has been to say that “when you’re trying to optimize user experience that juggles multitasking, multiple apps open at once and on a small screen, you’re going to get people landing on similar kinds of designs.” This essentially sidesteps the issue by throwing a subtle compliment HP’s way, but it brings up an interesting question — shouldn’t companies aim to make the best software possible, in spite of it potentially looking like a ripoff of someone else’s work?

HP derides BlackBerry PlayBook OS as a ‘fast imitation’ of webOS, RIM says it’s just good UI design originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Mar 2011 17:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We were crestfallen to discover that our review unit of the Laptop Dock for Moto’s Atrix 4G didn’t have multitouch capability, making scrolling a rather old-fashioned affair — and considering that a desktop build of Firefox figures prominently into Webtop’s capabilities, scrolling is something you’ll be doing quite a bit of. Well, this is where it gets weird: a number of people on xda-developers are discussing the fact that in-store demo units of the Laptop Dock seem to mysteriously have multitouch added in, and at least one poster notes that a Motorola rep that visited his local store a while back had multitouch working as well. That means one of three things: either these units are physically different hardware, they’re running a prerelease firmware upgrade, or they’ve got a feature that was pulled at the last minute, possibly because it didn’t work very well. Unfortunately, the latter seems plausible because Motorola has indicated to us that the Laptop Dock’s hardware doesn’t support multitouch and it’s not something we can expect to be added in down the road — but we can hope.

[Thanks, Caleb]

Motorola Atrix 4G Laptop Dock demo units have multitouch trackpads — but yours doesn’t originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 11:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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