HP sent me a TouchPad a couple weeks ago and after the first 2 days I haven't touched it. It just didn't seem like a finished product. I got errors and buggy UI interactions regularly. It lacked mature apps for basic usage like reading ebooks. Also, the screen rotation sensor is really sensitive so it almost always needs to have the orientation locked.
A couple things I did like about the TouchPad over the iPad: shift key on the keyboard to access special chars easier and downloading apps without being thrown out of the App Store.
As one of the few people that's actually used WebOS on a phone, when I try the TouchPad I'm baffled at how slow and clunky it is. The UI is smooth on even the Palm Pixi but on the TouchPad I get plenty of lag and glitches.
“I went out for dinner with someone new, but my date was late to pick me up, the car was uncomfortable, the place I was taken had terrible service, and I had the runs after eating the food there.”
“Yeah, but your date has learned a lot from taking people on dates like that and most of that stuff has been fixed. How about another date?”
Not making fun of your factually correct statement, obviously, just pointing out that in many cases you do not get a second chance to make a first impression.
I disagree. Consider people's first impressions of the iPhone when the iPhone 2G launched, or of Android when the G1 launched, or how almost every Blackberry device has launched with buggy firmware requiring users to update the OS only a couple of weeks after launch.
You're picking and choosing a specific example when, if you recall everyone else, it was pretty much the same thing. Buggy software was the sole reason why the TouchPad or even WebOS failed.
I feel like the prevailing sentiment in 2007 was that most everything Apple chose to include in the iPhone, they executed well. It wasn't all that buggy at launch. However, there was a lot of very valid criticism of it--mostly that it had many glaring omissions -- 3G, copy/paste, ability to turn off autocomplete so you can type in other languages, etc.
This has gone on to be the core of the Apple mobile strategy--they don't worry about being first to market with every feature, rather the biggest concern is not to ship buggy/unreliable stuff that doesn't deliver on its promises. If at all possible.
This is also the major disadvantage for anyone new coming into this space.
Apple got to launch their incomplete-but-solid product and then spend a year or two refining it and incrementally adding features. That's the advantage of redefining/creating the market you launch in though, it doesn't extend to anyone else.
For anyone trying to compete with them now, they have to hit the ground running with a comparable-or-better feature set (which I assume is why Android vendors make so much fuss about Flash) _and_ comparable polish.
Same here. I had the original 2G iPHone and its was absolutely amazing. It's hard to remember the state of cell phones back then anymore, but it was revolutionary imo and worked great from day one.
"Sole reason" I can't agree with, but WebOS has bugs that's for sure. I bought an HP Veer around Week 1. Last month I went back to my iPhone4 and I wouldn't go back (even before this announcement).
The Veer lags sometimes, for no obvious reason. Touches often register with the droplet effect, but fail to actually trigger the button you clearly hit. The Palm account had no way to update it online (better not forget to update your CC# before a purchase or you've effectively bricked the app-market). Mail was laggy, and seemed to rarely update properly. I couldn't have both my Work GoogleApps Mail, and my regular GMail on the phone as GMail accounts. I had to setup my personal account as an Exchange account.
None of these were instant deal-breakers, but with no updates, no fixes, and no communication I got tired of waiting for a fix that may never come.
Of course the app-store/market/whatever kinda sucked too.
My biggest peeve was copy & paste. Mentioned in another reply, but before the 2G iPhone I never had a real need for copy & paste since there weren't really worthwhile apps to copy & paste between on the feature-phones back then.
The WebOS copy/paste however absolutely sucks. It's tricky, I never remembered if it's Option+C or gesture-area+C no matter how many times I did it.
Oh, and the Veer screen was OK for most stuff, but waaay too small for web-browsing without Android's ability to re-flow text on zoom.
Along with patches, it is quite smooth indeed. Of course, the argument can and should be made that it should have shipped this way.
It is possible to set up Google Apps and personal Gmail on the same phone. Simply select GMail and enter email addresses with full domain i.e. you@work.com and you@gmail.com
I've done this (GMail setup). Didn't work for me. It appears to be a common problem.
I also installed a number of patches from Preware, but nothing to my knowledge really addresses any of these concerns.
The "laggy" effects are software, not CPU. Even another 50% CPU isn't going to help a 3-second pause every time you send an SMS. It isn't going to prevent clearly software related bugs in the Mail app. It's also not going to make the buggy software decide to start triggering events on buttons it's clearly already registering (due to the droplet indicator on taps).
It's not going to make copy/paste as smooth as a double-tap, drag a point to highlight selection, tap "Copy" and done. Honestly I never did figure out the way to highlight the selection I wanted consistently. I'm pretty sure text-selections are not an OS-wide feature.
Even if in the past 30 days community patches came out to address all these issues (I seriously doubt it), who wants to depend on the grace of others for a product you just paid $250 for a couple months ago when the company that sold you the product is more interested in releasing and patching/updating a tablet?
Add to that no Pre3, the 2.1, 2.2, 3.0 fragmentation, and it was clear that without some major, visible effort on HP's part the Veer was already dead.
Plus the damn phone doesn't provide an option to keep the screen off on the Touchstone charger without a community patch. That issue has been around since my old Pre Minus! Seriously WebOS? 9 out of 10 smartphone owners I know use their phone as their alarm clock. I don't want a damn flashlight to turn on 12" from my head on my nightstand at 3AM because I got an automated email. If it's not a SMS or Phone Call, turn off and stay off when I push the Lock button.
The one redeeming application on the app-store was the Remix music player. First non-iPhone music player I could get behind (I used to own a Nexus S, never found anything on Android that seemed to focus on the simple act of browsing your music library quickly and just playing). HP should've bought the app and replaced their ugly WinAmp3/Win95 era junk with it. :-) Too late now...
A couple things I did like about the TouchPad over the iPad: shift key on the keyboard to access special chars easier and downloading apps without being thrown out of the App Store.