Here lies TouchPad

It coulda, woulda, shoulda been a contender!

I am still in shock.

“I have not come to praise TouchPad, but to bury it”
to paraphrase Marcus Antonius

However, as I attempt to eulogize the Touchpad, I cannot help but give praise to the parts of the product that are, in my opinion, groundbreaking.

Apple co-founder and current CEO, Steve Jobs, is, by ay any metric, quite a great man. If you look at him from a marketing standpoint, he is without peer in this generation of business leaders, and a true titan among marketers.

However, in his constant tries to make his vision of a Post-PC world come true, he falls woefully short. For, by the very definition, his vaunted iPad is both personal, and is a computer!

In a stance worthy of envy by The Qiviter from Wasilla, Jobs discounts any criticism of the device as such.

Alas though, his own flag-bearer of the gilded Post-PC age, betrays him.

Since you are probably asking what this has to do with TouchPad, let me explain.

When you turn on a brand spankin’ new Apple iPad for the very first time, it is totally inoperable until you connect it to a PC running iTunes, be it a Windows client, or a Mac PC.

Think about this for a second: when you purchase this “harbinger” of the Post-PC world at any of the iStores, you are not informed that a requirement is to possess a computer as your transport to that world.

In contrast, initializing, setting up, and using an HP TouchPad does not require a PC!

All you need to set up the TouchPad is a Wi-Fi connection, and either an HP account, or the creation of the same.

Period.

My TouchPad experience
I was privileged to receive a couple of copies of the TouchPad for long-term reviews, and I was in the process of adding to that.

For the review copies in my possession, I must thank a highly-place HP executive who shall remain unnamed but has the initials B.H. – in fact, for this post, I will give him the codename, “Brad” – for copy number one. Copy number two was sent to me by Team TouchPad, for which I thank the Palm BU and Eric Harr for my inclusion in their program.

Initial thoughts
The two devices arrived within a day of each other, and I decided to wait and open them together.

My initial thoughts upon unboxing and installing the devices were:

1. Device looks good. Polished exterior is not a copy of the iPad.
2. Setup OOBE (out-of-box-experience) was good, easy.
3. Total over-the-air or OTA setup is refreshing.
4. Still coming to grips with the UI. Only because I have been using an iPad, and this is my first foray into the world of webOS.
5. Would like more customization of, well, everything exposed the average user without needing a 'guru' or coming to a forum for what I feel is rudimentary.
6. It is NOT an iPad or iPad2, so any comparisons are silly. It is as polished as I remember, and the size is right.

My thoughts and fondness for the device grew with my use of it. I carried it as my primary tablet in lieu of a Tablet PC on my business trips, and found it more than capable, the utility of the device definitely overcoming some very obvious shortcomings.

The second unit was given to She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, to replace her iPad with. She immediately like it since she could access her EMR/EHR (electronic medical records) suite with it without a rewrite of the interface. It supported Flash out of the box, and so she could look at charts and all that with verve, something she couldn’t do on her iPad.

Logikworx, TouchPad and webOS
When our strategic partner at the day job, HP, told of their move to webOS for every system, we caught that cold, deciding to focus on webOS so as not to be left behind.

In fact, I blogged about that here.

Feel free to assume that that position would NEVER come to pass.

You have my word on that!

Aftermath

Last week, at the quarterlies, HP CEO Léo Apotheker dropped the hammer: TouchPad was no more.

In the crazy aftermath of the muddled messaging that emanated from HP over the weekend, it has emerged that webOS might survive the massacre.

To which I now say, “I don’t give a flying eff!”

 

The quandary
TouchPad is a pretty good device.

The price drop to $99 for the 16GB version makes it an even better buy. It is a capable internet browsing device, and at the fire sale price, an incredibly good buy. I actually drove 46 miles each way round-trip to buy eleven of the devices, but my desire was thwarted by an imbecilic mega-mart manager who decided to sell the devices to “her local customers” rather that keep holding them for me. We shall refer to he as the ‘Wicked, yet Stupid Witch of both the East & West’ for the rest of this episode.

While the device has reached a premature EOL (end-of-life) with HP, it is still a good buy. I wanted to pick up nine of the devices – 2 were for a friend – to see if the intrepid hackers at XDA Developers would create a ROM for it in the Windows 8 era, or see if developers at Logikworx would be able to create web-based frontends for either our LOB apps, or something. Either way, I would have put them to good use, despite their DNR status.

What now?
I am keeping the TouchPads. Well, until they are recalled by their owners. In the interim, I will continue to use them, and try to be as productive as I can.

Yes, I do under that they run Linux –ewwwww! - but, there’s no accounting for bad taste.

I will keep holding on to hope that since it uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon chip and associated silicon, a Windows 8 hack would be made for it. If not, my staff can use them to learn more about webOS, whenever HP decides to perform recto-cranial self-extraction on whatever ails it/them.

The Bad & Ugly

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    • HP betrayed it’s hardware bent by trying to develop all aspects of the device in-house. Case in point is the browser. While compliant, no doubt, it is slow, fugly, and seems dated in use. The TouchPad would have been better served if HP had contracted with a company such as Opera to develop the browser.
    • TouchPad had iPad v1 as the competition, and was totally myopic in aping it in form factor.
    • Over-promising, and totally underwhelming, even with missed delivery dates.
    • Offloading of almost all support to user groups/community. This insulates HP from the heavy-lift of actually answering to consumers, creating a failure point, since these communities are almost always invariably staffed by zealots

Finally…
Prior to last week, I thought it was nearly a dead heat for ‘Insane Deal of the Computer Era So Far’, with Fox (with MySpace) just beating Microsoft (with Danger) by a nose. However, the acquisition size – double Fox’s MySpace buy, and the swiftness with which the Palm/webOS deal unraveled, makes this the textbook case B-school students will labor over for years. Well, until the next suckers come along; witness the rumored $10 billion valuation for DropBox!

Meanwhile, word of dissent in Palo Alto continue to surface, showing that this is a somewhat unpalatable dish to swallow.

Me, my foray into a non-Windows platform has ended. Whatever HP decides to do with webOS will be looked upon with scorn, and derision by yours truly, and I have instructed my staff to instantly delete any webOS partitions on systems that we provision for our clients.

We will however, continue to evaluate webOS, and keep a jaundiced eye on it. We may not like it going forward, but we are NOT blithering idiots!

This sorta long textual funeral dirge has been for the TouchPad, as it’s soul is committed to Sov’Vo’Kor

Adieu.

I will be giving a copy of the book, Social Media Judo, starring yours truly to three randomly-selected people who email me at john.obeto@absolutevista.com.

Should the winner prefer, a Kindle version of the book will be substituted once that becomes available.

This free offer ends on September 30, 2011 at midnight Mountain Time.