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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someone0 - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
The author start confusing when he trying to prove that there is no hardware problem by saying that the CPU is fine. I'm sure a lot of people here have built their PC before. So, the analogy that CPU=hardware is not valid. Even given that it's CPU package, still shouldn't the author treat the tablet PCB like a motherboard. The whole article totally ignore the existance of the PCB. I'm sure the argument that the software/OS is not optimize, but it is iffy to start blanking a variable here and dumping the whole problem on OS. I guess this answer will be fully answer when we start seeing Android custom ROM on the tablet. But either way the fault still on HP regardless of whether it's hardware or software.tipoo - Saturday, December 10, 2011 - link
SoC, not CPU. There's a reason these are called System on a Chip(s).bobbozzo - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
1. s/morover/moreover/ on Page12. the CPU instruction set revision should be largely irrelevant:
it's Linux, so it's C, not assembly; therefore it's mostly just a matter of re-compiling. Yes, SMD optimizations (if done manually) are an exception.
p05esto - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
I picked up two 16GB Touchpads for my wife and I at Best Buy Saturday night. ...and I'm KICKING myself for not getting the 32GB versions they also had there. A few movies later and my device is already full. I wish it had a FlashCard reader for additional memory, that part sucks.But other than that I really LOVE this tablet. The email program is better than Outlook and the other webmail systems I use. The browser renders nice and some of the games are great. The $10 Need for Speed game is AMAZING, the graphics are fantastic, no lag, great detail. I can't believe how good the graphics are on this thing. It totally blows the iPad away in the gaming/graphics power area. It's got a dual-core 1.5ghz CPU which you can overclock to 1.7 with a little effort.
In short, for $100 this was the deal of a lifetime for me. I had no interest in tablets before (due to price point), but now I'm in love. It sure beats a laptop in bed/couch for casual email and web browsing. Also great for movies on the go for the kids or games to keep them all busy.
I hope HP opens up WebOS to the devewloper community, this little platform could really flourish if opened up to all for free. Open source could make this thing take off. With a few tweaks in the UI and cusomtization department I can see the TouchPad becoming a legenday device, a coveted item to own and something that another manufacturer will want to start developing hardware for!
Chadder007 - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
And what....HP wants to be just a Software company now? LOLZextegra - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
Sorry I do not agree with your article. People buy to much into these benchmarks used on tablets and phones. They are inaccurate and unproven. Also the architecture of the CPUs look good on paper but most do not understand them and only take what the engineers have to say. I believe the snap dragon is the AMD in this tablet war and the a5 is the intel. I think once we see another os ported on the touchpad that soc was a large part of the fault.spunkybart - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 - link
I'm mostly an Apple guy (iPad, iPhone, iMac, iPod...), but I was rooting for WebOS -- I had heard it was a decent OS. Apple needs competition so that Apple products get better (and to give users an escape hatch if Apple keeps trying to control user content too much!)What surprised me most was how fast this all went down. If HP wasn't fully committed to WebOS and tablets for the long haul, then why'd they spend money and time on buying Palm and developing a tablet? It just seems a colossal waste -- and surely a morale buster inside the company.
amorexue - Sunday, September 25, 2011 - link
this is my site www.loveweddingdress.co.ukmattj7 - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
I recently put Cyanogenmod 9 alpha 3 on my hp touchpad, and the difference is night and day. I honestly thought this was an under powered tablet because of the performance I was getting on webos. NOPE, with android this baby flies! I'm sure the asus transformer prime or ipad 3 would put it to shame, but it has all the power I need to game, browse pdfs, web pages, video, whatever, and Cyanogenmod 9 is still in alpha and full of bugs! But it has the hardware acceleration and thats probably the biggest jump in performance.It's not the hardware, it's webOS holding back the touchpad. As much as I liked the swipe gestures, the deserted app market, and laggy performance makes having android on it all the sweeter!