I’m still reeling from what they did to Palm.
Palm was on the ropes - no doubt - but they have a massive patent library easily worth their purchase price and they had some very real growing mindshare with their webOS phone operating system (for those who haven’t used it, it’s extremely compelling compared to the competition).
What Palm lacked was money, their warchest down to roughly 500 million dollars. When HP bought them (1.2 billion, so a bit over half a billion dollars when you figure in the cash Palm had in the bank), everyone involved breathed a sigh of relief and said: Wow, palm is going to make it!
The way forward was so clear you could have asked a blind man for a roadmap and been given something reasonably accurate. The homebrew scene had done AMAZING things with the original palm phone. They had designed new custom kernels that had the phone running at 1.0-1.2 gigahertz on thousands of phones with no casualty’s (they scaled speeds based on use and because of this ran incredibly faster, cooler, and with longer battery life than the stock phone. There were also a huge number of patches and tweaks that fixed every little problem with the phone and added tons of useful features. All of this made possible because Palm left the phone open and hackable (you literally entered the “konami code” into the phone and it opened into development mode). The problem? Only a minority of the Pre users knew this existed, and most users were still suffering with a buggy and sluggish phone that wasn’t coming close to demonstrating it’s true potential.
These fixes should have been baked into a new patch for all existing Pre users IMMEDIATELY while HP worked on putting out a truly next-gen phone. The whole community offered the patch up on a silver platter, the work was done, the cake was ready to eat. The 2%-4% of the smartphone users were about to get a patch that was going to rock their world. I’m telling you guys that the experience of using a palm pre with these patches is like holding a brand new piece of hardware. My pre is running at 1.1ghz (a speed that roughly matches the -BRAND NEW- phones out there), is butter-smooth with amazing multitasking (I can run dozens of open “cards”, have multiple browsers open surfing the web, and switch between everything seamlessly). A person running a stock pre? They are going to have slowdowns, chuggy unresponsiveness (it’s only a 500mhz processor), and when they try to open more than a few windows they’ll get a memory error that says “too many cards, close some cards and try again” (the homebrew patches added compressed ram and fixed this issue).
Instead, HP killed all support of the “legacy” devices at barely over a year old. This meant not only would the old phones receive all the amazing boosts a -few- of us were enjoying, but also that the development community for applications was completely shafted. Palm had been promising 2.0 webOS for all palm phones, and 2.0 apps are incompatible with the 1.4.5 running on those current devices. A large number of palm devs had worked for months and months on the next wave of 2.0 apps (2.0 could do many things 1.4.5 could not), only to discover that their already small market of potential customers had been cut by 2/3rds without any warning. This was obviously a HUGE mistake.
HP’s reasons for this? The “legacy devices” (original palm pre/pixi) couldn’t handle 2.0. The reason this statement is hilarious? A leaked virtually completed 2.0 kernel hit the scene and demonstrated that it worked absolutely fine. Even funnier, the homebrew community came up with a way to install 2.0 -with- all of the proper speedups and patches they’d created onto the legacy phones and they work beautifully. Of course, only a few hundred people with palm phones know this, while the thousands upon thousands of other people who own the phone are stuck.
Then HP came out with their new line of phones/tablets. Every single one of them was underwhelming. The touchpad was an ipad 1 clone priced expensively and released just as apple released their IPAD 2 - it was doomed to failure. The new palm veer is a tiny phone that doesn’t showcase webOS thanks to it’s itty bitty touchscreen. The Pre 2 was a joke (barely better than an original palm pre and ran crappier than the original pre properly patched).
Finally HP announced they were going to make a real effort - the PRE 3 was coming! Here was a phone with a larger screen, a better footprint, gorilla glass, a decent processor. It’s the webOS phone many of us wanted, and while I still feel it was a little underwhelming on components (needed a dual core processor, for example), it was still a huge step forward.
HP went into full gear, production got started, palm workers were excited for the future. 5 days ago, palm released the pre 3 in europe with US release coming ASAP. And then HP killed the whole brand, saying they were no longer supporting or producing any hardware and pulling the plug on the launch.
Nobody at palm knew this was coming. Whole elements of HP were in the dark. There’s a production line out there that was humming along just a few days ago pumping these phones out. There’s gotta be a freaking warehouse full of phones ready to launch. Several people managed to buy the phone before it was effectively yanked.
All adopters of any newer hardware are totally shafted. The app development community is now effectively dead and anyone who purchased in the last few months is angry. Best buy is offering to take back 25,000 touchpads they sold over the last two months - they seem angry about the whole thing too.
Touchpads were on sale for 99$/149$ yesterday night and this-morning at several retailers. Sold out everywhere now. Insanity.
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