Why webOS failed to take off?

Bye Touchpad!

HP has recently announced plans to sell the remaining of their Touchpad inventory for the last firesales. But mind you, those are refurbished units, so it is a sort of buyers beware situation. The great news aside, why has HP failed in a tablet market whereby Apple and Samsung is succeeding? Don't get me wrong, I think webOS is great with better browsing experience than other tablets out there, in addition, I am receiving favourable comments from my geeky Touchpad users about how good it's battery life is. But I think it's failure is HP's failure to capture the minds and hearts of consumers.

It could be due to it's late foray into the tablet market when everyone is already in the game. But it is highly unlikely, given that Samsung still succeeded despite being late into the game. I believe that it is due to the software that they have on the tablet that marked the table's doom.

The reason is simple, consumers in the tablet market is looking for either something that is cool or are looking at the flexibility of the operating system whereby they can customise their operating system in order to fit their needs or to place add-ons.

With the former being Apple fans who would glamour for any phones that are released by Apple and care less about the specifications of the gadget that they buy. Have you realised that Apple does not release much details of the hardware inside the iPhone? Instead, they focus on the wow aspect of the new phones that they release. Initially with the multi-touch screen and maybe in the future with the crack-resistant screens that they have patented.

The latter group of people that I describe would be those geeky fans in the Android marketplace. They seek to custom-rebuild whatever they brought. They seek to tear down the barrier that mobile applications company errect in order to force you to buy their awesome game. That is why you see an very active community of people that is actively trying to break the legal barrier and provide those software for free. There is a smaller group of people doing that for Apple.



Even the one of the world's most successful Android phone manufacturor is not immune to it. They faced massive backlash and decided to unlock the bootloader of all the phones that they sell earlier in the year.

So where does HP place in the two community? It's Touchpad is neither glamorous or sexy to start with, in fact it looks a little like the Galaxy Tab rip-off. So it is good-bye to Touchpad for good! For those adventurous Android users, you can pick up the Touchpad and port it over to Ice-Cream Sandwich as the kind folks at Cyanogenmod has successfully done it quite some time back.