Thoughts on the HP TouchPad

I'm a huge fan of old Palm products. The Palm Pilot was so iconic that its name became synonymous with every PDA and early smartphone for over a decade. When HP purchased Palm last year, it seemed like a fairly solid pairing. Palm needed the resources and logistical support to compete more directly with leviathans like Apple and Google. At the same time, HP needed a mobile device strategy that would allow it to deploy weapons against Apple iThings and other manufacturer's Android devices. So HP put over a billion dollars on the table and bought Palm, and with it, WebOS - an incredibly sophisticated mobile operating system that could go toe-to-toe with Android and iOS.

HP/Palm's Goal: families of connected devices.

The result of this marriage could've been game-changing. Imagine if every device in your life ran the same software, and they all communicated with each other seamlessly and shared a consistent user experience. This was the promise HP made when they bought Palm. WebOS was going to be optimized for a massive range of devices: phones, tablets, printers, laptops, Autobots, etc. Imagine changing the wallpaper on your phone and having that change automatically reflected on all of your other devices, or bookmarking a website on your laptop and finding that the same bookmark has automatically been sent to your phone and tablet. These are the kinds of things that could be accomplished if all of your devices are talking to each other over the cloud.

All of your devices under one umbrella.

But none of these things really came to fruition at HP's press event yesterday. Instead, we learned that HP's new flagship phones would be incredibly unambitious rehashes of the unsuccessful Palm Pre and Palm Pre 2. More importantly, HP's answer to the iPad - the 'TouchPad' - is a tragically boring "me too" product. Don't get me wrong; WebOS runs beautifully on a large tablet screen, and its ability to manage running apps like cards or sheets of paper is still miles ahead of the multitasking solution on the iPhone and iPad. If HP released the TouchPad today, its features would stack up pretty well against the iPad. But HP's planning on launching this thing in the summer, when it'll be going up against the inevitable iPad 2 and a vast army of Honeycomb-enabled Android tablets. In that epic summertime battle, the TouchPad just doesn't do enough to differentiate against the competition. What's that, HP?  It can read Kindle books? SO CAN EVERYTHING ELSE AT BEST BUY. It lacks a noteworthy competitive advantage; sure, HP could price it cheaper than the iPad, but it probably won't be able to compete on price with a number of the Android tablets.

Bottom line, I don't see an audience for the TouchPad. If you want an iPad, the TouchPad doesn't offer enough to convince you to change your mind. If you hate Apple or think the iPad is too expensive, you'll get an Android tablet - especially if you're already running with an Android phone. If you're in the corporate sector, you're either one of the many companies adopting the iPad, or you're taking a hard look at the upcoming Blackberry PlayBook, which differs from the iPad substantially in function and form factor.

What's the point of having the same operating system on multiple devices if the devices aren't really that connected to each other? Sure, HP added that nifty feature where you can physically 'tap' two devices together to share web URLs. It's a cute feature, but it's too limited to be useful. Yes, it's cool that WebOS phones will be able to forward phone calls to the TouchPad, but why not let me transfer new app downloads or song purchases this way?

Early design documents revealed that HP was looking at bundling cloud storage to these devices as a way to manage your music. Imagine uploading your whole iTunes library onto the cloud so that any of your devices could stream your music over the internet, eliminating the need to pre-load gigabytes of music onto your phone (similar to the rumored Google Music service). I was hoping we'd actually see this feature at the press event, because one area where WebOS has been truly weak is in its multimedia experience - it just doesn't have a good (and different) solution to getting your music and videos onto devices. Using over-the-cloud connectivity to differentiate their products was a beautiful idea that HP couldn't realize in any tangible way.

It's truly unfortunate, because I wanted to see Palm's legacy and the excellent WebOS solidify a meaningful place in an over-crowded market. With this unambitious first-try from HP, I just don't see it happening yet.

Farewell to one of my favorite brands.