HP's TouchPad at MWC 2011
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 14, 2011 9:45 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- HP
- touchpad
- MWC 2011
- Mobile
- Tablets
- Trade Shows
HP stopped by a Qualcomm roundtable discussion to demonstrate the HP Veer, Pre 3 and TouchPad that it recently announced. Mithun covered the webOS event for us but this was the first time I was able play with the devices.
Everything HP announced at its event is powered by a Qualcomm SoC. The Veer runs webOS 2.2 and uses a MSM7230 with a single Scorpion core running at 800MHz. The primary take away from my experience with the Veer is that it is really, really tiny.
The Pre 3 felt very good and snappy. It's based on the highest clocked single-core ARM based SoC on the market today: Qualcomm's MSM8x55 running at 1.4GHz. Qualcomm mentioned that this is a standard part that's available to everyone - why HP ended up being the first to launch with it is unusual.
One thing I did notice in using all of the devices is that there's still room for performance optimization. There are occasional slowdowns or dropped frames in the UI. The HP representative present indicated that there's still a great deal of work to be done on both the hardware and software side before the devices ship.
The TouchPad is by far the most interesting as webOS just begs to be used on a larger screen. The UI is smooth although again I saw some indications that HP needs to do more performance tuning. Given what we saw with the original Pre, I am concerned but we'll have to reserve judgement until final hardware hits the market. Performance optimizing can take a long time and we're still months away from a launch.
Check out the video above for a quick look at the HP TouchPad.
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DesktopMan - Monday, February 14, 2011 - link
How well they manage to improve the performance before launch is key to their success or failure. Nobody will be impressed with an OS that lags on the latest dual core SoC. That said, if they make this as smooth as it should be I might be getting one.firechiefsta - Monday, February 14, 2011 - link
Hardware is forever, software is water under the bridge. In fact, hardware IS the bridge. This hardware is a horrible rinky dink me too concept. Ohh, they have touchstone.Greenhell6 - Monday, February 14, 2011 - link
Anand, nice job on busting her chops ! I think your questions were a little to geeky for her :)chomlee - Tuesday, February 15, 2011 - link
Wow! All that time developing a great product and one of the first demos to the public is from someone who didn't really know anything about the device. I've seen more knowledgeable staff at radio shack. She didn't even know how much memory was in the device. She was probably really hot which qualifies her to be the premier person to demo HP's flagship device.They better have a great marketing plan because I would hate to see this fail like the palm pre. WebOS is like the batamax of mobile OS. In a lot of ways, it is better than all the other operating systems. Unfortunately, poor marketing killed palm.
(ｐｐｓｈｏｐｐｉｎｇ) - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 - link
welcome