The HP TouchPad Will Come With Its Own Facebook Tablet App (Leaked Pics)
The world has been waiting for an official Facebook tablet app, and waiting, and waiting. But that app may not appear on the iPad first (although Facebook is working on an iPad app for sure).
Context & Ripple Effects
HP has spent weeks setting expectations for its webOS tablet, with the company's own claim in May 2011 that the TouchPad would beat 'the number one' tablet still hanging in the air. What it lacked was software differentiation — and a dedicated Facebook app is exactly the kind of marquee preload that fills that gap.
The vacuum it exploits is real: more than a year after Facebook's iPad impostor 'Facebook Ultimate' was pulled from the App Store, users have been using scaled-up iPhone builds, even as TechCrunch noted in late May that Facebook was hiring for a desktop software team while the iPad app remained unbuilt. A leaked TouchPad build shipping Facebook's first purpose-built tablet interface would hand HP a temporary exclusivity window on the most-visited social service.
First-order effects
- HP gains a concrete launch differentiator for the TouchPad against an iPad that still runs a stretched iPhone app, letting marketing lean on 'the first official Facebook tablet experience.'
- Facebook's confirmed work on a native iPad app caps the value of that window — any exclusivity HP buys is short-lived by design.
Second-order effects
- Apple faces renewed pressure in its Facebook relationship, since every week the official iPad app stays unreleased hands rivals a visible talking point about the iOS ecosystem's completeness.
- Other tablet entrants chasing the iPad — Android licensees and RIM among them — now face buyer expectations that a new slate ship with first-class Facebook support out of the box.
Third-order effects
- If flagship social apps become table stakes at tablet launch, platform competition shifts another notch from hardware specs toward exclusive or early app distribution deals.
- For Facebook, building tablet-native clients outside iOS first signals a strategy of treating its audience as portable across platforms rather than tied to any one device maker — a posture that shapes how future OS launches negotiate for its app.
The trend: Tablet launches are increasingly contested through exclusive social-app distribution, with Facebook's slow native-client cadence turning each new device debut into an opening rivals can exploit.