HP wows with future of webOS but falls short on delivery

HP, née Palm, took the wraps off its TouchPad yesterday - a 9.7-inch tablet running the all-new webOS 3.0 platform on a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon CPU. Amid announcements of a refresh to its flagship device, the HP Pre, and the introduction of a sub 3-inch form factor handset, the HP Veer, the TouchPad was easily the most impressive 'release' of the day.

Technically the new hardware itself is slick, impressive and the improvements in webOS are equally magnificent, showing off innovation from a company that clearly understands the UI transition from handset to tablet - not to mention interfacing between the two (tap-to-share, literally). As an ex-Apple senior vice president, Jon Rubinstein clearly has the vision and knowledge to steer HP's efforts in mobile, and its acquisition of Palm in 2010 gave his team the stability they sorely needed to play a long-term game in an industry that is now dominated by software.

Yet release seems to be exactly the problem: during the two-hour event not a word on pricing nor a specific release date was uttered. In an effort to get into customers' hands as fast as possible HP will ship a Wi-Fi only model this summer while its 3G and 4G siblings will ship "later". There are a whole lot of devices in the tablet market shipping "later".

On paper, HP's offering looks great: solid revised hardware in the mobile camp and brand new wow-factor hardware in the tablet arena. In addition several smart plays should help HP where Palm's first-generation models fell a little short. In particular, the underpowered hardware of the first Pre (and later, the Pixi) produced lacklustre adoption rates outside of early sales. This has been rectified with the new Pre which now packs a significant punch, headlined by the latest 1.4 GHz Snapdragon CPU. Additionally, offering a Wi-Fi only version of the TouchPad not only allows them to get to market quicker (plugging the gap until a TouchPad with a mobile chipset is ready), but additionally avoids having to rely on the carrier distribution network and subsidies that also hampered the first Pre. HP's distribution network will easily resolve Palm's woes in this area. Provided the TouchPad is as impressive as Rubinstein's demo and given the subtle sparks of innovation in webOS we continue to see from the Palm team, clearly HP's only problem is the "later" part of "later".

So early-adopters and tech press are dying to get their hands on these devices, which begs the question: why pre-announce now? The answer is simply that competing OS platforms are now evolving so fast that a feeling of unease is rising within the industry among vendors, afraid of being left behind on the Next Big Thing. We've seen this on multiple occasions in recent months: first RIM pre-announced the PlayBook shortly before Christmas with an aim to deter would-be holiday purchases of the iPad. Just last week, Google staged an event to demo their tablet flavour of Android, Honeycomb, that didn't quite, well, 'demo'; the OS showed extreme promise but sloppy execution on stage and rough edges in the user experience disappointed some pundits. Yet despite these initial bugs, Motorola's Xoom is slated to ship end-February with Honeycomb, instantly nullifying the first-mover advantage of tablets running Android 2.2 and serving as a stark reminder of the pace in this sector.

Thus this rapid evolution of products that didn't exist in some vendors' line-ups just three years ago are essentially now driving the future of the entire computing industry. Big names that have driven the PC OS market - HP, Microsoft, Samsung and Dell - are now looking to mobile for the next chapter. Given the lack of shipping dates on many products, it's no wonder then that these vendors need to position themselves at the forefront of this dawn in the transformation of the humble computer.

Which should make Nokia's fighting talk this Friday all the more exciting.