It's Not Qualcomm's Fault: Dispelling TouchPad Myths
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on August 19, 2011 6:40 PM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- HP
- Snapdragon
- OMAP
- Qualcomm
- Smartphones
- touchpad
- Mobile
webOS Needed Work
From the very beginning, webOS needed work in the optimization department. The hardware wasn't at fault, it was the software that always needed tuning, and as we saw with the Pre Plus even throwing more RAM at the problem didn't speed things up enough. We mentioned a number of places where webOS 2.0 still needed work to improve performance and smoothness in the Veer review. First among those really were the criminally long boot times:
"Unfortunately loading times on the Veer are still incredibly long due to some mismanagement of the linux boot process. Unfortunately it appears that WebOS increases the sleep time that apps send to the caller during the boot process from an already crazy 60 seconds to 120 seconds. There's discussion of this on WebOS Internals, but the situation is even worse now, at 120 seconds."
What Palm managed to develop was an excellent UI and front end to an OS, but there's little doubt that the underlying Linux code needed (and still needs) work. Simple tricks like disabling logging and implementing the boot process properly would result in noticeable performance gains. There's little dobut that other similar simple things could dramatically improve performance.
The fact of the matter is that Palm needed a lot of development time to turn webOS into a mature product. The HP of today is trying to turn itself into a fully focused enterprise company and as a result, webOS wasn't going to get the support it needed. An internal source at HP told me that the sales targets for the TouchPad were between the best selling Honeycomb tablets and the iPad. When that didn't happen, HP saw no reason to continue down the webOS hardware path.
As an enterprise company the move makes sense for HP and its shareholders. As consumers, we're disappointed. But the blame doesn't fall on Qualcomm or any chip vendor in the TouchPad, just on HP itself. The TouchPad needed more work, and webOS as a whole needs more work. You can either scale a project out by taking more time to get it done, or you can scale its width by committing more resources to it. The latter (and more efficient development) is what Palm has needed since day one, what HP promised to bring to it, and sadly exactly what it ultimately failed to receive at HP.
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seapeople - Saturday, August 20, 2011 - link
I think it's pretty clear that ANAND has sold out to the INTARWEB because of how quickly he used it to past ALL HIS ARTICLES. I know this because I've been reading lots of OTHER TECH BLOGS and they are much more CRITICAL of NON-INTARWEB communication!I mean, Anand hasn't even mentioned the Verizon strike that's been going on. Should he mention such a major issue in telecommunications? Of course not, it's because he's in the INTARWEB DIRTY MONEY BUSINESS.
ssnova - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
"I mean, Anand hasn't even mentioned the Verizon strike that's been going on."If you've been an avid Anandtech reader, then you would know they don't waste their time on politics and issues of that nature. If you want that kind of "intarweb" "buzz" then that's what Dailytech is for. Anandtech has always focused more on technical articles, educating the reader, breaking things down in an informative manner.
I vouch for Anandtech because I've been an avid reader of their articles since 2003, and though no review is perfect, something that I always respected Anandtech for was their thorough in-depth breakdowns of subject matters and drawing logical conclusions(as best as possible, drawn from the subjective/objective data). This goes generally for all their veteran staff, which I haven't seen some of them post articles in a while.
...On a random note, whatever happened to Kristopher Kubicki? I don't even see Dailytech posts by him anymore?
Any how... again... the stuff on here is just a technical breakdown with some insight, perhaps it could have been titled better, but after reading the article I see no reason to try and please the crowd when spitting it out in your own way.
WeaselITB - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
@ssnovaI think you need to get your sarcasm-meter checked ...
-Weasel
jaysns - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
I like this kind of article when you see the internets abuzz, and by that I mean the bigger blogging sites, with misinformation. A lot of sites were reporting on this and a nice little write up explaining why it was untrue and didn't even make sense is a good thing. Not everyone knows these things, and even I who understands this, and is well read up enough at least to notice the BS that engadget and others were putting out, enjoyed reading this. This is my favorite tech site. Just wish you guys posted more :p. Keep up the good work.Zoolookuk - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
I can't ever remember thinking an Anand article was way off target, but this one is. You dedicated 3 pages to telling us this wasn't a hardware issue, and then showed a benchmark illustrating the TouchPad was half the speed of the iPad 2, which has fairly modest hardware specs. If you reviewed the latest AMD chip and showed it at half the speed of a 6 month old Intel processor, you wouldn't claim it has 'similar performance'. I really don't get that.The irony here of course isn't you letting a 200% performance gap go, it's that NO ONE is saying the reason the TouchPad bombed is because of overall performance. Leaping to it's defense seems a little weird.
I don't even agree that the issue is WebOS - it's a fine operating system that had a lot of promise. The issues were:
- Terrible design and build quality (it looked and felt like a budget iPad)
- Non-existant or poor marketing (Glee? Really?)
- No integration within anything meaningful. Android has the entire Google eco system, while Apple has iTunes and virtually everything else
Maybe read this too early on a Sunday morning, but you seem to be trying to prove a point that just isn't there.
ViRGE - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
"Maybe read this too early on a Sunday morning"I think that would seem to be the case. The only argument Anand is making is that the poor performance you see - "then showed a benchmark illustrating the TouchPad was half the speed of the iPad 2" - is due to the software and not the hardware. That still makes the TouchPad a lousy device, but the purpose of the article is to establish why.
And someone did say the problem was the TouchPad's performance: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/19/hp-tested-w... . That's the article that spurred this one, since the idea that a dual-core A9 is twice as fast as a dual-core Snapdragon (clocked 20% higher) is silly.
Snapdragon ~= Tegra 2 (source: many, many AT phone reviews)
Tegra 2 ~= Apple A5 (source: AT Galaxy Tab 10.1 review)
QED: Snapdragon ~= Apple A5
Hence the idea that the iPad (Apple A5) platform being twice as fast as the Snapdragon platform is silly. The software stinks, the hardware is fine.
tipoo - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
No, he said that it had similar performance to the Tegra 2, then showed the huge performance difference between them, showing that its a software thing and not a CPU thing.sirsoffrito - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
I was already suspicious of these other websites claiming Qualcomm's incompetency. It seemed pretty hard to believe given the amount of inefficient bloat HP's Windows machines come with. In such a competitive market as tablets now, manufacturer's have exactly *one* shot to prove they are up to snuff, and I can't say I've been terribly impressed with HP's build quality hardware wise in recent years, much less all the software they try and foist upon people. What's funny is that the software is so incredibly important and is often the most ignored. A well optimized program can make all the difference in the world. People respond to a clean, snappy interface; hence Apple's success.superccs - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
SO essentially you are saying that this device has legitimate hardware, just poor implementation...?Wouldn't this make this device a steal for rooters and modders?
Zoolookuk - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
The WebOS team apparently experimented with their OS on the iPad2 hardware, where it ran 'twice as fast' .http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/22/hp_r...