Man, WebOS just can’t catch a break can it?
By the time Palm finally Bit The Fabled Large One, most mobile insiders agreed that WebOS was pretty much the best platform out there. Yeah, yeah, I know — all the Apple Fanbois and Android
I was hoping that HP’s takeover of Palm would lead it into releasing some truly affordable, usable tablet/phone devices that would allow me to leave iTunes (the Bane of My Existence!) behind and move data/content on and off the phone as though it was an actual, you know, external hard drive (which it is, and should function like).
So it comes as bitter new that BestBuy is reporting that so few TouchPads have actually sold that they are thinking about charging them big buckolas for all the space the poor, orphaned devices are taking up on the valuable store shelves & warehouses (h/t AllThingsD)
According to one source who’s seen internal HP reports, Best Buy has
taken delivery of 270,000 TouchPads and has so far managed to sell only
25,000, or less than 10 percent of the units in its inventory.A second person who has seen Best Buy’s TouchPad sales figures
confirmed the results as “consistent with what I’ve seen,” and went so
far as to say that 25,000 sold might be “charitable.” This source
suggested that the 25,000-unit sales number may not account for units
that consumers return to stores for a refund.Best Buy, sources tell us, is so unhappy that it has told HP it’s
unwilling to pay for all the TouchPads it has taking up expensive space
in its stores and warehouses and wants HP to take them back. HP, for its
part, is pleading with Best Buy to be patient. We’re also told a senior
HP executive, possibly executive VP Todd Bradley, is slated to travel
to Minneapolis soon to discuss the matter with Best Buy executives.
It seems that HP is having trouble figuring out what to do with something like an OS … something that doesn’t have wires & transistors. The megalomaniacs at Google may have done them a favor today with their purchase of Motorola, however (see any of the myriad analyses of “MotoGoo”).
What this means for web designers is that for at least the next year or so, expect iOS to remain atop the “brilliant phone” heap, with Android still playing catch-up. Which means that as Apple continues to dominate market share, there will still be compelling (even more compelling?) reasons to have native apps, rather than mobile web apps that run across every device. However, long-term, the migration to the mobile web still makes the same sense as leaving the AOL walled garden for the larger internet made sense back in ’99-2000.
