HP Announces The TouchPad
It's official. Palm's new WebOS state is device is called the Touchpad. It has a 9.7-inch screen, front 1.3-megapixel camera, and comes in 16 or 32GB models. It runs a 1.2GHz Snapdragon Processor processor and the screen resolution is 1024×768.
Context & Ripple Effects
HP's 2010 purchase of Palm was always about more than phones — Fortune framed the deal at announcement time as buying "a mobile future, untethered from Microsoft" — and today the company showed what it intends to do with it: a 9.7-inch webOS tablet called the TouchPad, running a 1.2GHz Snapdragon with a front-facing camera and 16/32GB configurations.
The device had been circulating as rumor for weeks — a January leak laid out specifications for the "Topaz" slate and suggested HP planned to position it as highly competitive with Apple's iPad in both hardware and software (both still unconfirmed claims), alongside reports of cloud storage and Touchstone v2 accessory plans. What HP did not give on stage was a price or ship date, which Silicon Alley Insider's companion coverage and at least one commentator on an iPad 2 were quick to flag.
First-order effects
- Palm's webOS moves from smartphones to tablets overnight, putting HP head-to-head with Apple's iPad on screen size and resolution (1024×768) while Qualcomm's 1.2GHz Snapdragon lands its most visible tablet design win.
- Per Silicon Alley Insider, HP is positioning webOS as an addition to Windows rather than a replacement — a framing that keeps HP's PC business intact while giving the OS room to grow.
Second-order effects
- Competitors are already being measured against it: Robert Scoble argues the announcement makes Google Android look even more creaky and leaves RIM, Nokia, and Microsoft out of the game — opinion rather than fact, but it captures the competitive frame HP wants.
- Early hands-on reactions cut the other way: Gizmodo found the TouchPad looks great but feels slow, meaning HP has to close a performance gap before launch or cede the responsiveness argument to Apple.
Third-order effects
- If HP executes on the ecosystem signals from the leaks — cloud storage, updated Touchstone accessories — the structural bet is that vertically integrated hardware-plus-OS stacks, Apple-style, are what separate durable tablet platforms from licensed ones.
- A credible third tablet platform would also force every carrier and developer allocating between iOS and Android to budget for a third option, raising the cost of single-ecosystem strategies across the industry.
The trend: Tablet computing is consolidating around vertically integrated hardware-and-OS ecosystems, with HP wagering its Palm acquisition can establish a third pole beside iOS and Android.