Yesterday, the Guardian carried a rumor that HP is going to kill off its webOS operating system. WebOS is the operating system that powered the TouchPad tablet that sold unspectacularly until HP slashed the prices to sell out of excess inventory. However, HP’s Executive Vice President Todd Bradley has said in a TV interview that this is an “unfounded rumor” and that, even though HP was no longer making webOS tablets, they were “continuing to invest in webOS software” due to its “very unique capabilities.” This includes software updates for the million TouchPads currently out there. While...

Every so often, a story comes along that makes you go, “…what? No, really…what?” In the wake of the HP TouchPad fire sale, some mysterious TouchPad units appeared that were running a version of Android 2.2, with a splash screen bearing the logo QuIC, referring to the Qualcomm Innovation Center, a subsidiary of Qualcomm that works on adapting open-source software for products made by Qualcomm and its partners. One of these tablets sold on eBay for $1,425. Needless to say, a lot of Android users have been anxious to get their hands on the source code associated with...

Ever since the decline of its original Palm line heralded the end of the true “PDA”, the various properties that once made up Palm have been the digital equivalent of hot potatoes. Consider Peanut Press, which started out as an independent e-bookstore, was owned by Palm for a while under the name “Palm Digital Media”, was spun off to NetLibrary and renamed “eReader”, and was eventually bought by competitor Fictionwise—which was then bought by Barnes & Noble to form the basis of its Nook e-readers. Now the latest anonymous rumor has it that the remnants of Palm itself, currently...

When most manufacturers fire-sale price a discontinued item, the intention is to sell out of that item so they do not have to carry further inventory of it and pay for storage costs on that inventory. Which is why it’s a bit puzzling that, just a week or so after discontinuing and fire-selling the TouchPad, HP has announced it is actually making more of them to meet consumer demand. Although the $99 fire sale pricing is not guaranteed, there’s no indication of how large this run will actually be, and there will be strict per-customer limits to prevent mass...

The aftershocks of HP’s $99 TouchPad fire sale continue to make themselves felt. On ReadWriteWeb, Dan Rowinski posts an op-ed looking at the lessons the tablet sale can teach. He touches on some of the same points I did yesterday, others are worth mentioning—such as when he points out that the lack of apps for WebOS does not necessarily mean purchasing the tablet is a bad idea. Perhaps spurred on by Apple’s in-app purchase stance, HTML5 browser-run apps are coming in a major way and, Rowinski notes, the TouchPad’s browser is the best one on any of the current crop...

The big story in the world of tablets and e-readers that broke this weekend involves the HP TouchPad. A sort of chain reaction took place starting when a big box retailer shipped hundreds of thousands of unsold units back to HP, which suddenly found itself swimming in unwanted tablets. The sales figures were spectacularly unimpressive: that retailer only managed to sell 25,000 out of the 270,000 tablets it ordered, and deal site Woot only sold 612 of them when it offered them for $120 off earlier this month. The sales figures remind me of the much-maligned JooJoo from...

HP's flagship tablet, the Touchpad, launched just a month ago in 16GB and 32GB models for $500 and $600 respectively, but in an attempt to move more units the company has introduced a $100 discount to both models. The new $400/500 prices are now showing up on sites like Amazon and BestBuy.com, but if you want a slightly better deal you should check out today's offer from Amazon-owned Woot.com: $380 + $5 shipping. Here's another review of the device if you want a second opinion....

On TechCrunch, guest writer Jim Dalrymple from The Loop looks at why, a year on, Apple’s iPad still has no real competition and all the other hardware manufacturers are still scrambling to catch up. He points out that Apple has done such a good job making the tablet useful in people’s everyday lives that everybody else is still trying to be Apple rather than beat Apple. Every other tablet introduced thus far has looked remarkably similar to the iPad. Even the competitors who come the closest—HP and RIM—still haven’t done anything. And Apple is only a week...

HP has come out with a new $799 Windows 7 tablet PC, called the Slate 500. Ars Technica’s Peter Bright has a brief look at it, finding that it is aimed squarely at businesses rather than consumers—don’t expect to be using it for e-reading in the home, unless you have a lot more money to burn than the average tablet consumer. The result is a device for corporations to run custom Windows applications on—healthcare, point-of-sale, banking, that kind of thing. This point is underscored by HP's marketing video. In these environments, the ability to run...

A number of sources, including Ars Technica and Bloomberg, report that Research In Motion is rumored to be turning to embedded software company QNX to provide the operating system for its new tablet, allegedly to be called the “BlackPad”. RIM actually bought QNX Software Systems from Harman International Industries in April for $200 million. QNX embedded software is used in a variety of devices, ranging from BMW and Porsche car audio systems to medical devices to nuclear power plants to the Crusher robot tank. It has also been released as a downloadable bootable floppy disk distribution, and has...