Hewlett - Packard vagabond out its debut entrant into the red - hot tablet market , the HP Touchpad , as well as two unexampled smartphones — all running the latest version of the webOS assume last year when it buy Palm .
The HP Touchpad
HP may be behind some competitors in introducing a pad , but Todd Bradley , executive frailty chairperson of HP ’s Personal Systems Group , involve that the market place is in its babyhood as he kicked off the Wednesday consequence . “ The market for connected devices is , conservatively , $ 160 billion . And we ’re in the other stages of a grow market , ” he said .
The HP Touchpad
Read Macworld ’s live coverage of the HP webOS issue .
The HP Touchpad will be the first in a family of tablet devices , HP said . It has a mellow - closure 1024×768 9.7 inch - video display , weighs 1.6 Pound and is 13 mm thick . It has a 1.3 megapixel webcam , and tolerate video calling . It amount with 16 GB or 32 GB storage and uses the twofold - core group 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor . The Wi - Fi version will be available this summertime in the U.S. and prize markets worldwide , with 3 yard and 4 K interpretation come up by and by , HP say . A compact radio receiver keyboard is available for the Touchpad .
The Touchpad interface groups applications logically as “ batting order lot ” ; when a user is end up with using an app she can but flick it off the screen rather than shutting it down .
HP also showed off webOS-based smartphones on Wednesday.
Touching a compatible WebOS phone to the lozenge can mechanically fire up a web internet browser on the phone and display the same entanglement page that ’s displayed on the tablet . If a substance abuser discover directions to a eatery on their lozenge , for instance , and wants to take them out in the auto , she can knock the devices together and the page of directions appears on the phone .
HP ’s Synergy is used to synchronize WebOS gimmick , so WebOS earpiece and the pad can share address books , due east - mail and the similar . Also included is TouchPad at Work software system — QuickOffice , Google Docs , and VPN . Flash is back , unlike on the Apple iPad .
HP also showed off webOS - based smartphones on Wednesday .
The smartphones unveiled at the event — hold at the Herbst Pavilion in the Fort Mason Center beside the San Francisco Bay — were the tiny HP Veer and the Pre3 .
The Veer , about the size of it of a credit card , features a sloping trough - out QWERTY keyboard and 2.6 ” 320×400 touchscreen display , and a touch country for navigation . It supports Wi - Fi , Bluetooth , Flash and GPS , and includes a USB larboard and audio gob , as well as a 5 megapixel camera . The phone has 8 G bytes of storage and the same amount of memory as the Pre2 , and can be used as a Wi - Fi router for five devices . It will be usable in the early fountain .
The Pre3 has a 3.6 - inch 480×800 display , and 5 megapixel photographic camera that shoots HD telecasting with stabilization , as well as a forward - facing camera for video calling . It runs on HSPDA+ or EVDO and use a Qualcomm micro chip run at 1.4GHz . It will be available in the summer . Both phones are compatible with the Touchstone charging dock .
Sincebuying Palm , Bradley said , HP has deploy century of additional engineers — while keeping inviolate the leaders of Jon Rubinstein , who conjoin the HP team from Palm with webOS .
At Wednesday ’s result , Rubinstein called the Cartesian product of that study , webOS 2.1 , “ the most important one we ’ve done so far . It takes the original features that set webOS asunder , like dependable multitasking , synergism … and takes them further . ” The software package has 50 new features like VPN , voice mode and others , and will be uncommitted on the Pre2 from Verizon Thursday , he added .
HP take on webOS last April when it bought Palm for $ 1.2 billion in a surprisal move . HP ’s own handset concern had not been doing particularly well and it see Palm as a way to give itself a leg up — even though Palm was not a marketplace leader either .
It shortly became exculpated HP was look beyond smartphones , however . It said it would use webOS for its Web - connect printers , and as the iPad take off it saw chance there as well .
Wednesday ’s event is being closely watched to see what kind of computer hardware HP rolls out to get the most out of webOS .
Research is Motion is also in the game with itsPlayBook tablet , which runs its own BlackBerry software package . There are also tablets based on Windows 7 , though Microsoft has contend to make an impression in the tab market .
