The Forgotten Failure of Tech Company HP in Mobile Industry HP TouchPad Tablet

Although, now days, we know HP as a manufacturer of computers and printers, once in a while they were also trying to take place in the mobile industry. They started the job by creating their own tablets and phones. They used using the standard technology of the time which wasn’t much compared to what we have today as can be admired. In the mobile industry, most of the device manufacturers of electronic devices have contracts with chip producers, and they, the device manufacturers, are responsible for creating the design and the motherboard that will unite all the parts together.

So, from another perspective, it really comes down to the strategy that the company will follow in creating its device. What deals are they going to make, how well are they going to design, how well are they going to monitor the market? They also have rivals like Apple.

Apple is different from other manufacturers because they have been in the market for so long and they have had enough time to build a stable ecosystem around their products. They also make their own chips, which is the most outstanding thing. They used their own processor in their 2011 iPad devices. Since they also have their own operating system, they really put themselves out there compared to other manufacturers devices.

However, HP was an exceptional catastrophe on the field. They also had their own operating system. Namely, the WebOS. It was originally developed by Palm Inc. The company behind the ancestor of mobile devices and PDAs. In 2010, the CEO of HP Mark Hurd believe it will be right to use WebOS in their mobile devices. So they bought it from Palm Inc. They made it open source so that more people can see what they are using in their devices, just like how Android is. They also begin to use it on their devices.

On July 1, 2011, they released their tablet device, which will be their last deployment in the mobile industry. The name of the device is HP TouchPad. Initially, sales were as expected. But how would they know that Apple will be releasing their new iPad 2 just after 2 weeks after HP? Back then, Apple was a company with high interest, as how it is today. So people turn to the new iPad instead of the experimental and novice HP tablet. They start their selling price for the tablet from $499. It must be surprising that Apple also set their selling price for the new iPad at $499.

Due to the competition, HP had to drop their price to $399 after a short time of releasing the product. They stuck with that price for a while, but the sales still didn’t go as expected. So, they suddenly dropped the price to $99. With this last sudden drop, they sold their already produced tablets and then left the mobile scene.

As of today, HP has sold webOS to LG. LG is using webOS on their TVs.

HP also went through a lawsuit against the way they use the Linux kernel on their webOS system. Linux is an operating system that should have its code open to the public, even in the case of small modifications. That’s what the GPL license is and where its freedom comes from. In HP’s case, they used the Android kernel, which is already Linux-based. They also made some discreet changes to it that won’t be made public. So, since it’s not hard for people to extract the webOS kernel and analyze it, they quickly find out that it is indeed a Linux kernel and has been modified as well. With the discovery of the kernel modification, some people end up suing HP for violating the GPL license. As anticipated, since to the source code of the modifications are nowhere to be found, the lawsuit ended up against HP. After that HP had to release the source code of the modified Android kernel. This had an accelerating effect on Android port to HP TouchPad.