The tablet that would not die, the HP TouchPad along with its operating system webOS is back in the news. The HP TouchPad was responsible for more app downloads than for Android tablets while HP showed its commitment to webOS as an open source operation system.
HP CEO Meg Whitman warned attendees at the HP Global Partner Festival that now that Google owns Motorola, Android could become a closed-platform. She let the audience know that HP is still committed to webOS for the long run. If Android becomes closed, then webOS devices would benefit.
HP announced how the open-source for webOS will be governed along with February releases for Open webOS which included QtWebkit, Isis web browser and integration with JavaScript core.
The new Isis webOS browser has been benchmarked and shown to be extremely responsive compared to other browsers made for general consumption.
There is a chart that shows the figures for USA Today app downloads. Surprisingly, webOS HP TouchPad tablets accounted for 250,000 downloads slightly less than the 260,00 Kindle Fire but more than the 130,000 Android Tablet downloads. The iPad downloads amounted to 2.9 million. iPhone also dominated mobile phones with 4.8M downloads, Android 3.1 million and Windows Phone 80,000.
The favorable numbers for the HP TouchPad are not surprising since the tablet ranks higher in satisfaction than for the iPad.
It seems like the HP TouchPad may never die, because it still sells for more than the fire sale prices on eBay and Amazon.com.
Refurbished HP TouchPad tablets appeared on Woot! and sold-out quickly at higher than fire sale prices.
The HP TouchPad because it has a non-metalic case has been used by doctors it in MRI chambers to serve data. The HP TouchPad appears in the Wireless and Mobile News' top tablets of 2011 and top trends of 2011.
The HP TouchPad sold-out and flew off the shelves when it was reduced to $99 for 16 GB and $149 for 32 GB. A second run was sold-out to employees who spent the whole day ordering HP TouchPads with some complaining about the loss of work time.
HP officially announced that they had no more new TouchPads in stock on November 7.