I dearly hope the offer a decent tablet that is inexpensive and <i>not</i> tied to a mobile carrier. I think one of the things that killed Palm/Pre was that they tried to play the 'mobile phone' game, when they could have gone 'retro' with the "pda without a mobile phone" and done much better.<p>Lots of geeks and non geeks would be willing to give a device a spot in their lives that doesn't displace their current mobile phone. Given the current state in the US, we're overwhelmingly tied to 'contracts' and steep monthly fees. The threshold any device needs to meet to displace our current devices at any given time is huge.<p>However... many people are willing to plunk down $150+ for an iPod Touch - which is for most purposes an iPhone with no phone, which also means no contracts, carriers, monthly fees, etc. If you like it, great! If not, it'll make a nice gift for some family member or friend. The barrier to trying one out is much lower.<p>Regardless of the initial price ("free phone!") most of us now understand that any "mobile phone device" we get is going to cost us $500-$1000/year for multiple years. Playing that game is way too costly - the stakes are too high - the carriers have no real incentive to push you 3 months from now when the next model of something else is 'new'. iPhones have been the exception to all this, and betting your company on being the next disruptive exception was/is foolhardy (Palm pre-HP).<p>Apple already <i>proved</i> there's a large market for wifi-only devices - let's hope HPalm's new webOS devices offer sanely priced wifi-only options.
I just wanted to chime in and say that webOS is pretty cool to develop for. I went to a developer outreach event in San Diego a while back, and managed to make a fully-functional FMyLife app in less than 3 hours (not knowing anything about webOS beforehand).<p>Developing for webOS is a lot like developing Flex applications (which I had done previously), except the API is way less complicated than Flex's API, and it's all in HTML/CSS/JavaScript. I had a set of posters with all of the Flex objects/events/methods and it was seriously 3 posters worth of 9pt text.<p>I was really happy to hear that webOS was given new life at HP, because I had a really nice time developing for it and I was hoping that it would get some traction so I would have a reason to develop for it for real.
Just hope that they'll keep supporting the original Pre. I kinda like the little pebble, hardware is fast enough and with some decent software upgrades it still should come in handy.
"Vibrant 18 bit" display - is that just spec jargon for a cheap TN panel? 6-bits for each R, G, and B? The IPS panel in the iPad is a huge selling point for Apple. It is higher quality than almost any modern laptop screen.
I really hope they do come out with something nice. I wrote applications for the palm pre with their ares IDE and it was a blast. They just don't have the user base to make it worthwhile for developers and it sucks because I don't think anything beats HTML/Javascript when it comes to writing mobile apps.