HP’s Jon Rubinstein — formerly of Palm CEO fame, of course — just mentioned in an interview with Fortune that webOS 2.0 is on track for “later this year.” Considering that 2010 is more than half over, that doesn’t leave a whole heck of a lot of time — but with a mix of presumed kick-ass HP hardware in the pipeline running webOS, we imagine this should all dovetail nicely. On a related note, Rubinstein again drove home the point that they’re developing new hardware “aggressively,” so let’s hope we finally see a Pre 2, a Palmpad, or heck, a frickin’ LifeDrive 2 in the next few months.
We can’t say we know exactly what’s going on here, but it does appear that the HP Slate still lives in all its Windows 7 (and Intel Atom) glory. Yep, the guys at IDG News spotted the good ol’ 8.9-inch HP Slate — now apparently the Slate 500 — hanging out on a rather hidden HP.com page. The details are few and far between, but they do seem to coincide with all that we originally had heard about the tablet — it runs Windows 7 Home Premium, has “exclusive” HP software and two cameras. And that’s not all, the chaps at IDG also noticed that the Slate 500 was Energy Star certified, and a listing for the same product on Energy Star’s site confirms that it will have a 1.6GHz processor. That too seems to line up with what we had heard about the Slate having a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 CPU. We know, it’s all a bit surreal considering we just got word yesterday that HP had filed a trademark on the term PalmPad, and we figured the Slate may have seen its day. There’s no telling what will happen next, but it sure is looking like a HP Win 7 and WebOS tablet may just live in harmony.
Whoa! After breaking the 1GHz barrier just three weeks ago, dauntless modder unixpsycho is back with yet another insane hack for the aging Palm Pre. What’s new? Why, this “SR71 Blackbird” custom kernel, which simply pushes the poor little OMAP3430 processor up to 1.2GHz — that’s twice the original clock speed, just so you know. As glamorous as it sounds, potential users are triple-warned about this mod potentially failing the webOS device in one way or another, despite the built-in speed-scaling mechanism to cap the device at 55 degrees Celsius (131 in Fahrenheit). And needless to say, don’t expect your stock battery to hold up for more than a few blinks once implemented. Good luck, pilgrims.
HP’s been extremely direct in saying that it plans to release webOS tablets and other devices in the future, and now that the Palm acquisition is complete, it looks like those plans are starting to move forward — the company just filed a trademark application for “PalmPad,” which certainly sounds like a webOS tablet to us. We don’t know much apart from that, but it’s certainly an encouraging sign — and we can’t help but feel a twinge of nostalgia for a name that harkens back to the glory days of the PalmPilot. Now we’re just wondering when (this fall?), how much, and — as usual — what this means for the HP Slate. We’ll keep our eyes open.
We’re having a hell of a time believing this, but BusinessInsider’s Dan Frommer is citing “a source familiar with the negotiations” as saying that RIM, Google, and Apple — yes, Apple — were all in the mix for Palm at one point or another as the bidding war went on earlier this year. We all know how that story ended up playing out, but prior to HP’s winning bid, RIM allegedly made a generous offer and could’ve ultimately come away with the prize had it not failed to re-up the bid (and may have even reduced it, looking at Palm’s SEC filings) after HP made its move. For its part, Google apparently made some not-too-serious moves, primarily in a perceived head game with Apple.
Speaking of Apple, the company was said to be in it primarily for Palm’s sizable patent portfolio — but is claimed to have also been interested in keeping the platform alive, possibly in an effort to compete in the physical QWERTY market where the iPhone has not. Of course, if you look way back, it’s important to remember that Mac OS X itself is based on outside work (if you consider NeXT “outside”), so we guess that keeping webOS alive in some capacity after an Apple acquisition wouldn’t be totally unprecedented — but it’d still be really, really weird at best.
Now that HP has sealed its acquisition of Palm, the PC maker is working hard to get Palm’s webOS mobile operating system onto HP products.
Palm’s webOS will power HP upcoming tablet, says HP CTO Phil McKinney. The tablet known as HP Slate had earlier been designed using Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system. HP also plans to put webOS on printers, says McKinney.
“There’s a gap for devices that are larger than a smartphone but smaller than a netbook,” he told attendees at the ongoing Mobile Beat conference in San Francisco. “Slates could fit in that category.”
Unlike rival Dell, which chose the Google-designed open source Android OS to create its cellphone and tablet, HP spent $1.2 billion to buy Palm. The transaction closed earlier this month.
HP wants to control all pieces of the mobile ecosystem, says McKinney.
“If you look at success in the market, they are those companies who can control the end user experience and the entire experience stack,” he says.
That sounds more like Apple and less like Google. But it is clearly the direction that HP wants to go. In March, HP seemed poised to launch its Slate tablet offering sneak peeks of the device through carefully edited videos. Leaks of the company’s plans for the Slate pegged the price of the device at $550.
But in a surprise move in April, HP announced its buying Palm and with that it sent the Slate back to the drawing board. McKinney says HP is not yet ready to announce a launch date for the Slate.
“I am not going to pre-announce products but I will say that we are investing money into research & development and marketing at Palm.”
Is this the answer to the question we posed back in mid-June? Maybe. While we’re still unsure if Hewlett-Packard has a webOS-based tablet in its pipeline, those on-again / off-again Windows 7 rumors may finally be nearing an end. On the homepage of this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference — which kicks off in earnest today in Washington, D.C. — there’s a pane of Windows 7 slates that are on deck for this year. Er, a pane with vendors promising Win7 slates this year. Sure enough, HP’s logo is front and center, right alongside the likes of Sony, Dell, ASUS, Panasonic, Onkyo, Toshiba, MSI, Samsung, Lenovo and Fujitsu. We’ll be keeping an ear to the ground for more, but for now, feel free to let your imaginations run wild. It’s Monday, after all.
Update: During the event’s opening keynote, which was headed by none other than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the bigwig confirmed some of what’s pictured above: Windows 7 slates will be arriving this year. Interestingly, he never mentioned HP by name (despite teasing us gently at CES with an apparent mystery device), but he did note that devices would be available at various price points and in a variety of form factors — “with keyboards, touch only, dockable, able to handle digital ink, etc.” We already knew as much from being overwhelmed by prototypes at Computex, but it’s good to get the word straight from Ballmer himself. Now, to see if anyone’s actually interested in buying a desktop OS on a mobile form factor…
Update 2: Seems Ballmer’s drinking his own Kool-Aid in a serious way, and not just on the tablet front. He noted that Microsoft will be giving consumers “a set of Windows-based devices that people will be proud to carry at home and will fit the kinds of scenarios enterprise IT’s trying to make happen with the phone form factor,” and that Microsoft would be “working vigorously” to “drive enterprise IT and consumers.” Furthermore, Steve affirmed that the tablet sector is “terribly important” for his company, and that it’s “hardcore about this.” He didn’t shy away from calling the range of Windows 7-based tablets coming out “over the next several months” ones that would be “quite impressive,” but honestly — what else would you expect him to say?
Palm CEO John Rubinstein will continue to head up his webOS team under new boss HP, and will be working on smartphones, “future slate PCs and netbooks,” according to a statement from HP
The computer giant completed its acquisition of Palm yesterday, and announced that Palm will continue to develop both hardware and software, headed up by former Apple employee Rubinstein.
This will include new phones (the Pre and Pixi lines are now also owned by HP), but most exciting is the confirmation that there will be webOS tablets. After all, apart from iOS, name another operating system that is as suited to a tablet as the webOS (sure, Android is close, but still a little too clunky).
Better still, HP has the deep pockets to go up against Apple, and if Rubinstein and team are left to work on great machines their combined experience (many of them are also Apple alumni) should finally provide an iPad competitor. And even if you are a total, unashamed iPad fanboy, this should still excite you. Competition is good for us buyers. Take a look at the iPhone 4: Do you think it would be this good if Android and Palm weren’t chasing so close behind?
The major new feature of Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 4, is multitasking. What took the company so long? Apple claims it was waiting to get multitasking just right before unleashing the feature for the iPhone. Meanwhile, the Android OS and Palm Web OS have supported multitasking just fine for over a year.
However, each platform handles multitasking quite differently. Let’s take a closer look at how each mobile OS’s multitasking works.
Apple iOS 4
How you use it When you press the Home button twice, Apple’s iOS 4 displays a “drawer” allowing you to switch between apps. The drawer shows your most recently used apps. This is similar to the “alt-tab” functionality we’re accustomed to on traditional PCs.
What’s going on When you leave an app in iOS 4, it’s not actually closing (unlike previous versions of the OS). Instead, it’s going into frozen, suspended animation, sitting inertly in the background. So when you relaunch an app, it opens instantly to pick up from where it left off before you “closed” it. That behavior allows you to switch between apps very quickly — a feature called Fast App Switching, which is the core functionality of Apple’s iOS multitasking. (TidBITS has an excellent in-depth explanation of Fast App Switching.)
Fast App Switching isn’t all iOS 4 multitasking does, as there are a few exceptions for specific types of apps. Apple allows apps that play audio, connect with voice-over-IP or use location detection to run quietly in the background while one thread is still active. So that’s why, for example, you can leave the Pandora app, and the music will still be playing in the background while you check your e-mail. Likewise, you can leave Skype while on a VoIP call, and you won’t hang up on your buddy while you’re browsing Safari, for example. Third, you can leave a mapping app or a fitness tracker like RunKepper and come back to it, and it’ll still have a lock on your location.
It’s up to third-party app developers, of course, to tell their apps to behave this way with the new iOS 4 software development kit.
Another sort of background activity iOS supports is push notifications, which keeps a specific internet port active while the iPhone is in hibernation, so you can receive e-mails, instant messages and alerts even when the screen is off. These alerts pop up on the screen in the same way as SMS on the iPhone.
WIRED Fast App Switching is indeed fast and stylish, avoids draining battery. All apps are constantly running inertly, so you can quickly switch between them all.
TIRED Only allows a single application thread to continue running; only certain kinds of activities are allowed to run in the background. Push notifications scream for your attention at the center of the screen.
Android OS
How you use it Hold down the Home button and a tray appears showing the apps running in the background. Switch to another app and it instantly opens.
What’s going on Android’s multitasking behavior is by far the most complicated to explain.
In Android, when a user switches to another application, the app you switched from doesn’t shut down: Its process is kept around in the background, allowing it to continue working (e.g., for downloading web pages in the background while doing something else), and come immediately to the foreground if the user returns to it. If the smartphone is running low on memory, Android starts killing off unnecessary processes to free up resources.
If a user later returns to an application that’s been killed, Android re-launches it in the same state as it was last seen, by keeping track of the parts of the application the user is aware of, and restarting them in the last state they were seen in. This last state is generated each time the user rotates the screen or leaves the application.
There are two basic components to control what apps can do in the background. Apps with “broadcast receivers” go into the background and wait to go off in an event, such as an alarm going off at a certain time, or if you receive a notification from Google’s server for getting a new message in Gmail. The other background component is called a “service,” which instructs an app to perform a task such as music playback or turn-by-turn navigation for a certain amount of time in the background. It’s up to the third-party app developers to embed these components in their apps so they behave these ways in the background.
WIRED Apps can stay fully functional while running in the background. Notification tray makes it easy for apps to give you information without interrupting what you’re doing. Users don’t have to manually quit apps when memory is running low: Android does that for you.
TIRED Getting multitasking to work just right in an app is a lot of work for developers.
HP WebOS
How you use it The HP (formerly Palm) WebOS displays apps as “cards.” Each card acts similar to a tab in a desktop web browser. You move between activities using gestures (swipe forward, swipe back, hold to readjust the positioning of the cards), and when you’re finished with an activity, you can throw the card off the screen to quit the application.
What’s going on WebOS allocates resources (memory, processor cycles, network access) to each card based on requests from the cards. The System Manager prioritizes the card in the foreground when allocating resources. Apps in the background are placed in a semi-dormant state, and their access to services is restricted.
If an application that the user isn’t currently interacting with wants to get the user’s attention, the app can display information in the notification area at the bottom of the screen. The information sits in the dashboard until acted on or closed. (Therefore, you can do something in a foreground app while dealing with a notification, whereas on the iPhone a push notification shows up in the center of the screen interrupting your task until you close it or leave your current app.)
Activities in the background do not have access to certain battery-intensive services. For example, apps cannot access accelerometer data and their frequency of network access is reduced. Third-party games are paused in place when moved to the background, reducing both their CPU load and memory consumption.
WIRED The card interface is neat, and it feels very natural to switch between apps. Notifications appear at bottom of the screen, not interrupting your current task.
TIRED After launching a specific number of apps that reach your memory limit, you can’t launch any more, and you have to manually quit an app before launching another.
Palm’s made a few half-baked attempts at wooing developers in the past, like that time in October when it waived the fees and review process for open-source apps (but not App Catalog entries) or when it provided discounted handsets that happened to carry a large carrier-specific ball and chain. This week, Palm’s decided to be a bit more generous — it’s eliminating the $50 App Catalog submission fee entirely and putting every last cent back where it came from. With only 2,684 apps in the store, that’s just $134,200 in total, but symbolically it’s a very welcome gesture, no? According to the official Palm Developer Center Blog, developers should see credits appear in their PayPal accounts soon — though perhaps not soon enough to spend it on the fruit of their fellow man’s labor at 50 percent off.
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HP’s Jon Rubinstein — formerly of Palm CEO fame, of course — just mentioned in an interview with Fortune that webOS 2.0 is on track for “later this year.” Considering that 2010 is more than half over, that doesn’t leave a whole heck of a lot of time — but with a mix of presumed kick-ass HP hardware in the pipeline running webOS, we imagine this should all dovetail nicely. On a related note, Rubinstein again drove home the point that they’re developing new hardware “aggressively,” so let’s hope we finally see a Pre 2, a Palmpad, or heck, a frickin’ LifeDrive 2 in the next few months.
