Never mind the marketplace is having a hard time selling the first TouchPad. Never mind that it has a fraction of the apps found on competing platforms. Never mind that it works best when paired with the least popular smartphone. HP is prepping a new TouchPad for an US launch. The TouchPad Go is a 7-inch tablet from the same strain the produced the original. Oh goodie. → Read More
If at first you don’t succeed, keep reducing the price until something sticks. HP is reducing the price of the 16GB HP TouchPad to $399 – $100 off the original price.
This comes after HP’s move to reduce the price $50 a few days ago. These swift price changes are pretty odd, to be sure, and if things go any lower I’d suspect HP was telegraphing slow sales.
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HP has just released a new over-the-air update to the TouchPad, WebOS 3.0.2, that improves the OS slightly including improved auto-correction, the inclusion of wallpaper support, and improved photo handling.
The update will appear automatically for TouchPad owners and most devices should receive the update in the next few hours. → Read More
In the past few years, Apple has been in berzerker mode. Not even 15 years ago, they were on the verge of collapse when Michael Dell famously said that if he were CEO of Apple he would, “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders”. Apple now has a market cap well over ten times that of Dell’s. And in the past year or so, Apple has even managed to far surpass their old nemesis, Microsoft, in terms of market cap, revenue, and profit.
Today, Apple’s stock closed above $400 a share for the first time. This has pushed their market cap up to roughly $375 billion, making my prediction that they have a shot at catching Exxon to become the most valuable public company in the world this fall, look pretty good (they’re now “just” $45 billion away).
But what’s next? What other mountain can Apple scale? Well, there’s still a pretty big one in the tech sphere. → Read More
HP TouchPads now have a bit video content thanks to the just-announced Yamgo app. Like the other mobile incarnations of this app, the webOS version streams live content from select networks directly to the tablet. For free.
The UK-based company already has apps out for nearly every platform including iOS, Android, and Blackberry. The service delivers live sports, news, music videos and entertainment shows directly to these devices. The TouchPad is just the latest device to get in on the fun. → Read More
Such is the life of a device. If you can’t beat ‘em, undercut them. That’s just what’s happening at Amazon and Best Buy who both are now selling the Touchpad under it’s MSRP by a fair margin.
The 16GB model is cut by $10 at both retailers, making the price $489.99. The 32GB model is 5% under list at Amazon making it $572.65 while Best Buy just took a clean $20 off resulting in a $579.99 price. Good news for those still on fence, but not so much for those that jumped on the webOS tablet right away. → Read More
The TouchPad is here (we reviewed it), but it’s far from done. There are more varieties of the webOS tablet to hit, to begin with, and we’ve heard that a 7-inch version is on its way as well. Then, there’s the Pre 3, which was supposedly hitting in July. These vague visions of the future have all been cast in perfect clarity by this allegedly leaked roadmap document. → Read More
We didn’t exactly heart the TouchPad. We didn’t hate it, either. We even said that “WebOS and the Palm TouchPad are nearly perfect, an excellent amalgamation of everything that was ever right about Palm.” Granted, perfection in this industry lasts about as long as a battery cycle, and we had plenty to gripe about, but as far as the TouchPad goes, we have hope.
But day-one reviews haven’t been as understanding as we were, which has prompted HP’s webOS boss Jon Rubinstein to blast out an internal letter of support to both the TouchPad engineers and the webOS 3.0 development team encouraging them to keep up the work and continue believing in the product. → Read More
In this episode of Fly Or Die we go through a few popular gadgets including the MacBook-alike HP Probook 5330m, the EFun Nextbook, and the Nokia N9.
We found most of the devices to be acceptable but we were in agreement about the crablet EFun Nextbook which is about the worst piece of garbage imaginable (based on our extensive test that involved us looking at the thing as it crashed constantly.) → Read More
Does this thing look familiar to you? Granted, there are plenty of little differences, but at a first glance, what does this remind you of? If you said MacBook Pro, congratulations, we’re on the same wave length. The brushed metal finish, the keyboard, the black bezel around the screen… it all screams Apple. That’s all I’ll say on the matter, but I maintain that it had to be said. Starting at $799 configurations, how will it stack up against competition from Lenovo, Toshiba, and others? Let’s see.
I spent a week with the 13.3-inch ProBook and found that overall, it’s a very well-made little beast. Under the hood, you’ll find a 2.5 GHz Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics, a 500GB 7,200-rpm drive, and Windows 7 Professional. → Read More
Loopinsight has an interview with HP’s developer relations guy, Richard Kerris, where he basically says that WebOS is HP’s enterprise strategy, not their consumer play. He says:
“We think there’s a better opportunity for us to go after the enterprise space and those consumers that use PCs,” said Kerris. “This market is in it’s infancy and there is plenty of room for both of us to grow.”
“We think the world of Apple and have the utmost respect for their products,” said Kerris. “It would be ignorant for us to say that we are going to take it [the market] away from Apple.”
In John’s review of the new HP TouchPad, he claimed that “WebOS is the real star of this show. The OS offers true multi-tasking and uses a system of “cards” and “stacks” to display active applications.” I think it’s worthwhile to remind everyone that WebOS is built atop the Linux kernel, and that has several interesting ramifications. HP has continued Palm’s dedication to user experience, and WebOS should make it abundantly clear that “Linux” need not be synonymous with “complex and arcane”. But there’s a lot more than just superficial window dressing to consider.
Read on for more. → Read More
HP’s webOS tablet, the TouchPad, doesn’t officially hit until July 1st, but that hasn’t stopped some of the big retailers from putting their demo units out for the public to fondle. Sure, you could just watch the official demo videos, but nothing beats actually seeing something in action. Or seeing someone else see it in action, as in this YouTube video taken at a Kansas Wal-Mart. No sign of that 7-inch version we heard about, though. Anyway, keep your eyes open come July: we’ll have a full review up as soon as we’re reasonably sure we know what to think of the thing. [via Engadget] → Read More
The world has been waiting for an official Facebook tablet app, and waiting, and waiting. But that app may not appear on the iPad first (although Facebook is working on an iPad app for sure). Instead, Facebook’s first tablet app will appear on the HP TouchPad, which comes out this Friday and runs the WebOS it bought with Palm. Unless the iPad app also launches this week, the TouchPad will become the first tablet with an official Facebook app. Given the tension between Apple and Facebook, a concurrent launch on the iPad seems unlikely. Update: Facebook has reached out to clarify that “this app was not built by Facebook but by HP.”
How do I know? I got my hands on some screenshots of the Facebook app for the TouchPad. You can see them here. But what I wonder is if this is also what the app will look like on the iPad. All I can say for sure is that these pics are from Facebook’s tablet app running on WebOS. → Read More
You don’t hear news like this too often these days, but according to Japanese business daily The Nikkei, HP is planning to shift part of its notebook production from China to Japan in the next few months. The Californian company plans to eventually manufacture all computers for sale in Japan in factories in Akishima near Tokyo. → Read More
If you are reading TechCrunch you probably already realize this fact: Flavor-of-the-month consumer Internet companies have a way of hogging the spotlight. If you didn’t, we conveniently published some evidence of it yesterday.
But that reality predates us by at least a decade. In 1999 when the world talked about Silicon Valley, they usually meant sexy dot coms. In 2005 when people were writing headlines about “the return of Silicon Valley,” a lot of people working in technology were justifiably irritated. After all, tech behemoths like eBay, Yahoo, Oracle, Intel, Hewlett-Packard never exactly left.
That focus on the sexy, social, consumer Web over everything else has only gotten more pronounced as those many of those one-time flavors of the month like Facebook, Zynga, Twitter and Groupon have become bonafide giants. The difference is that now the divergence in attention actually makes sense. → Read More
If you look at how Apple fares on the public markets today, compared to other tech powerhouses, you’ll notice that the Cupertino computer giant is currently valued at roughly $301 billion, which is close to the sum of the market cap of three of its closest rivals: Microsoft (~$200.3 billion), Hewlett-Packard (~$72.8 billion) and Dell (~$29.3 billion).
Market cap is of course just one metric – and arguably not even the best one – to make comparisons between companies. It is, nevertheless, a most excellent trend barometer and a simple way to compare valuations. → Read More
The HP Touchpad, the great Palm hope of tablet lovers everywhere, will be officially available for $500 for 16GB and $600 for 32GB on July 1 in the United States. It will be available in the UK, France, and Germany “a few days later” and Canada in mid-July. The rest of the world will see it trickle out over the summer.
We’ve been waiting for the Touchpad since February and, in a few short months, it has appeared to be ready for launch a few times until June looked like the target date. Sadly, it was not to be but that is remedied by this jubilant news.
Check out our hands-on here and read the PR after the jump. → Read More
