Yet another TouchPad demo: truly wireless [video] 82
Sun, 12 Jun 2011 9:53 am EDT 
Another day, another HP TouchPad demonstration, and they just keep getting better. Today it’s Sean back at HP Discover 2011, giving a 9-and-a-half-minute overview of the TouchPad, and it’s one of the best yet. They manage to touch on all of the key features and differentiators we’ve seen before, but notes something we hadn’t really considered before:
“You look at a platform, a family of devices that is truly wireless. The devices no longer need to be connected to the computer, so you remove that cable. The device no longer need to be connected to each other to transfer information or to be synced. The devices no longer need to be connected to a cable to charge.”
Synergy. Touch-to-Share. Touchstone. What other platform, tablet or smartphone, can say that? Video is after the break.
Source: Jake Ludington's Digitial Lifestyle; Via: WebOS Internals (Twitter)
82 Comments
Keep 'em coming. Makes July 1st come that much quicker.
What about the cables in the video? Are those new "wireless" cables? LOL
Neither device is plugged in to a cable. The Touchstone chargers they're on, yes, but not the phone or tablet themselves.
"Truly wireless"
Yep, just like your WiFi router home.
Seems like Touchstones never widely catch on until they're being cleared out for a pittance. And this was back when they were $30-50 for the phones. I don't think $80 for the TP Touchstone is going to reverse this trend.
It really is silly that this is sold as a separate accessory. HP needs to find a way to bundle this and eat as much of the cost as possible. It's one of the more obvious distinctive things left on this platform.
Agreed. Would be a Good thing to "make things right" for those of us who have held onto our old phones so we can trade in for these wonderful accessories. Just hopeful thinking, I'm going to get the whole mess regardless.
I bought one at full price, 2 at half price, and another 3 for $5/pop.
@ concept2: Your ignorance is overwelming
Two of my friends have already jumped to an Evo now that there contract is up. They are losing a lot of people by not telling us if sprint is getting this. I want one and will stick things out with my Pre- but need to know that a webOS phone is coming to Sprint.
I wish I would've known we weren't going to be getting a new WebOS phone for this long so I could've used my yearly upgrade and played with some new hardware while waiting. I've had my upgrade since September 1st and it just went to waste this whole time.
I did just that had my Evo for months. Had plans once the Pre3 was out to use the upgrade. That was until Sprint got stupid. Now have to wait another year. PO'd YEP BIG TIME. Does it matter? AT this point not so sure.
My Pre just started having issues and Sprint was pushing really hard to make me get an Android. I told them I use my phone at enterprise level with multiple Exchange accounts something Android is just not capable of doing right.
The rep said in that case we will send you a refurbished phone and charge $100 deductible. I laughed and told her I wanna talk to the supervisor and totally went off on the supervisor.
Sprint has become an Android reseller. They don't even try to sell the Blackberries. I told the supervisor enterprises don't use Android. They would rather use iPhone over Android. He apologized and overnighted a new Pre free of charge.
It's our own fault for not getting on Sprint's case. If Sprint doesn't bring Pre3 I will be moving on simply because it shows they are becoming a single platform provider.
I don't think they're as bad about pushing certain phones over others at corporate stores. I went to the one near my house a week ago to look at their stock, and no one bothered me the whole time. They were pretty much like, "when you find what you like let us know" and didn't try to convince me that one phone was "better" than another. But, I suppose it all depends on the store you go to and how it's managed and the types that work there.
the best yet
They should clone this HP employee and distribute him around the world as a webOS ambassador to appear in shops to sell and promote the webOS range, this has been the best demo I have seen so far!
I agree. They should also plant the guy who interviewed him in stores so that he can plant questions that essentially tell Android & iOS to suck it.
Seriously. This guy has best explained how are favorite toys work the I've seen so far. I wonder if he plays in these sites and forums
?
This guy is obviously using the WebOS that's how he knows everything about it. Not many people know WebOS is the only platform that can manage so many Exchange accounts.
Touch to share still seems a bit contradictory here talking about devices that don't need to be connected.
I don't believe it's contradictory at all. They don't need to be connected. It's still a wireless function, no different than the Touchstone charging. The point is that all you have to do to transfer data (and let's hope this feature is expanded upon so you can transfer just about anything - media, documents, app data, etc) is touch the devices together. That's even quicker than having the same profile on two devices. There's no waiting for a profile sync to happen. You just touch the devices together and off you go.
If anything, I think Touch to share exemplifies exactly what they mean by being truly wireless.
I don't think it's contradictory, per se, but it's largely meaningless since they couldn't relaunch before iOS5. They ALSO cut the cable to the PC and sync way more data than HP does between iOS devices wirelessly.
There is touch to share and there is having the same profile. Touch to share is to share information (for now just webpages) where as having the same profile allows you to have your phone calls and text messages show up on your TouchPad when you are within Bluetooth range of your phone.
VERY impressive. Take a god look folks. This is a preview of iOS 6 :D
I wonder if/how TouchPad is going to handle other keyboards then Latin. In iPhone you can easily choose other keyboards, for instance Russian/Greek/Hebrew/Thai/.... The same goes for displaying the characters in normal text/web.
I also would like this to work in the Pre 3/Veer. Anybody see anything from HP that hint about this????
No RTL or complex language support as of yet. I have been really pressing them over this. They said they will implement @fontface at some point which will allow apps to support complex languages but they really need to this at OS level.
To be fair though iOS is the only mobile OS capable of doing this at the moment but they really need to do it if they want to push the full web experience tagline.
I'm sure the future Preware will include keyboard language support patches!
The Flash performance on my 1 GHz OC'd Pre Plus and the TouchPad are about on par... and that's not a good thing. It's pretty unusable for video streaming.
They need to fix that up. It could be a deal breaker for a lot of buyers. I've used Android devices with Flash and the performance is fantastic comparatively.
I wouldn't think there would be any reason why my OC'd 2.1 Pre Plus couldn't perform on par with my cousin's Moto Droid 2 in Flash performance. :-s
It's doubtful if I would purchase a TouchPad if this is how the retail experience is with Flash.
That flash video didn't look too great. If they're all choppy like that then its not really much of a feature.
Don't worry, that was not an optimized version of webOS. It will be much faster in real life. LOL
But seriously, I can't imagine this is really how flash works on the TouchPad. I think this was more a glitch. I don't think HP would announce or even demo flash if it worked as seen that that video.
If it really does work like that...then...wow...#Fail.
Given how slowly the web page loaded on the Pre3, I suspect that they just had a crappy net connection.
Yeah, I noticed how poorly that flash video played and that was fairly alarming. I really hope that was just a problem with that specific video or that specific scenario. That would especially be alarming since HP is not coming out with a dedicated Youtube app. If the flash performance is that poor, it would make Youtube unusable.
Just yesterday I stopped at my local Best Buy to see if they were gearing up for the Touchpad launch with any HP displays (unfortunately they were not) and played around a bit with a Motorola Xoom. I checked out the Youtube app and was very happy with it. I feel that any device that is not truly a PC (laptop or desktop) needs to have a dedicated Youtube app. Hopefully HP knows best and they've got everything worked out.
I stopped by my Best Buy and the display was there. I also wanted to play with the Veer, which was missing from the mobile phone section of the store but there was a white one on the TouchPad display. I like the matte finish, and the keypad was nice and still very usable with my thumbnail typing.
Ironically, I tried to take pictures of the display to show my husband, and discovered the hard way that I should stop listening to the Music Player (Remix) first, because not only did the camera make the player stop, my phone locked up after taking the pics and got stuck with a broken-record effect when the player tried to start again. I ended up having to do a battery pull, and after waiting the 9 minutes it takes to restart (while driving to my next stop), the pics had disappeared!
Perhaps someone with technical knowledge of frame-rates can help me here, but won't the frame-rate of a flash video on the touchpad (or any device for that matter) that we are watching here will seem to appear choppier if the frame-rate of the review source (youtube etc) is also less than optimal? Perhaps the only way to judge any sort of lag is to see it in real life? Just a thought.
Yeah it probably has something to do with frame rate rather than the response time of the TouchPad. Videos become choppy if you are low on memory since it has to constantly empty the cache but in this case the TouchPad wasn't sluggish and was still running fairly smoothly which means it probably had something to do with the frame rate of the video.
Citrix was mentioned, and made me wonder if their involvement is only for business apps for specific businesses that use them for their own apps, or will the "go to my pc" app be available through the app catalog as I understand is true for iOS?
Also, I've been wondering if the iPad's vaunted app store volume is partly because an app is needed for everything because they don't have flash and aren't web-based? I mean, must they have an app for Fox News, for instance, because their users can't just pull up the Fox News website and watch all content directly there as I'm assuming I will be able to on my TouchPad?
I've already bought a new handbag that a TouchPad will fit into to make taking it everywhere with me a natural part of my life!
I'm assuming that all I'll really need will be a wifi 16g version since more and more will be stored in the cloud and I'll always have wifi handy, directly or through mobile hotspot the few times it's not handy. What are others out there thinking about which version they'll need?
STOP. DEMO-ING. FLASH. PLEASE.
C'mon, it was perfectly usable, that was like .5 frames/second!! This isn't a screaming desktop computer here, you can't expect 30 fps! ;-)
Looks like HP has their first tablet native app to compete with Garageband and PhotoBooth:
Slideshow.
I kid. But seriously....stop demoing a feature that's not ready for primetime. If the site is unreliable, don't demo. If the software is too beta, don't demo.
I agree. If they are going to have Flash & if they are going to demo it as an advantage vs the iPad, it at least has to work in a way that it would be usable/viewable. I thought this 9 minute video was amazing EXCEPT for the Flash--who would watch a movie that looked like that?
LOL
Excellent video. Wife saw this and exclaimed immediately that she no longer wants an iPad, she wants this. I can get one for me later! smh. shouldn't have shown her the video.
im jus happy ill have my touch pad in time for my vacation my girl has ipad 2 looks like she wont be the only one with something for that plane ride
that was an excellent video.
Damn, what a demo. Makes me all giddy. But I think to get all of those devices would probably cost me a grand? Whatever, still works like a charm like no other right now.
flash on that site is typical especially with heavy traffic...it can happen on ANY machine. so the results are correct. i have two high end machines and once in a while it happens.
There hasn't been a smooth Flash demo on this device yet. Don't think this is a fluke.
Keep in mind this demo was done at a media event where wi-fi/3g/4g connections are notoriously bad. I'm surprised it played at all.
My 2-cents, It can't be any worse than Android's Flash Player... oh wait, they are the same Flash Player 10.2/.3 so I don't think it's reflective of the tablets themselves. Blame Adobe, I do.
Final thought, I don't know that Flash enabled webpage support is all its cracked up to be, when my device upgraded from Android 2.1 to 2.2 and included the wonderful world of Flash web browsing, my page downloads took longer and now every web page I visit is suddenly overrun with flash advertising that i didn't have to put up with before. Thankfully the browser supports turning off flash support and allows for on-demand viewing flash content. This sped up page loading and I can touch the video frame to download and play and not have to look at the ads.
P.S. I can't wait for July 1st. :)
I would blame Adobe except Flash on the Playbook runs way smoother than on Android or WebOS. And I don't think internet connection mattered since the card was already loaded with a fully rendered trailer window (This wouldn't appear on Yahoo Movies unless you already pushed play), and thus the trailer was loaded and buffered before the rep ever pushed the play button.
Mikah912, your an angry dude mannn. Your so objective and negative. Talk to me. What's going on in your life? For REAL!!!!! I haven't heard nothing positive yet from you. Life is beautiful. Yours will get better.
hands down the best,and most concise, demo yet!
The guy that did the demo did an excellent job and he should be commended. I wondered if that Flash video was 1080P. I've seen many Android tablets struggled with 1080P videos as well. Since there's no HDMI out on TouchPad, it really makes no difference whether it can handle 1080P. I'll be more interested in the 720P capability. Being able to play 1080P is a nice feature to have (boast-worthy), but not a deal-breaker, IMHO.
Flash is smooth on webOS, even when you're running multiple cards with Flash video simultaneously. Sometimes some websites suck, and there were tens of thousands of devices on the HP Discover wifi network at any one time. 95 times out of 100 the video is smooth and plays with no issues. I feel like some people are very keen to find something to disparage about the device. There's no need to do that. If you don't like it or it's not for you, buy an iPad2 or a Xoom.
webOS is very underrated and that underdog status may turn out to be a huge benefit when it hits the market.
It's funny how anything good in these demos is totally representative of the platform, and anything not flattering is an aberration - even if it happens multiple times across separate videos.
Come on, folks. By all means, be proud of the Touch-to-Share integration, relatively smooth performance of cards, stacks, etc. But don't put your head in the sand when you see choppy video and scrolling. It's real.
You may see it that way, but its there for everyone to see and to some it works fine. Like techiegirl and others that have seen these videos, they can see how it works. And truth be told its a feature that the ipad 1-100 may never have. Whether its choppy or not it supports flash. A differentiating factor from the ipad. I don't think that's putting your head in the sand.
I am happy to see all these demos. We get to see how these features work and gets us wanting more. At least I know I do.
A differentiating factor from the iPad: Yes.
A differentiating factor from tablets: No.
Thing is, most non-iPad tablets ship with Flash. That bullet point on the marketing docket has not stopped those same non-iPad tablets from sitting on the shelves while the non-flash-enabled-iPads continue to sell in record numbers.
I don't think Flash is as big of a deal as people try and make it out to be.
"To some it works fine"
To those people, I think the device powering up without exploding is all it takes to meet that lofty requirement.
It's so funny how people can be so demanding about "true multitasking" and notifications, but almost any amount of chop and lag is "fine".
Good demo..... But I could not take my eyes of that pre3! Come on sprint!!
will touch to share and other integration work with Pre 2?
If they keep their promise and do the OS update on it. Same goes for Veer as well.
WHOA!! Wait a mintue! Am I the only one that didn't know about the swipe to view cards?!?!? That's just like the phones and I thought they DIDN'T HAVE ANYTHING of gestures or small touch spots on the sides of the screen?!?!? How did I not know that... Anyone else?
All they need now is something like swipe-up-then-right to switch apps to replace advanced gestures
They're going to need the Back gesture at some point. I can't pick up a smartphone without trying to do that.
I'm with you. I pick up my iPod and nexus s and always try to gesture. From the looks of it though, without a dedicated gesture area the implenetation on this version on this touchpad may not make sense. Likebwith any other device its something that can built upon.
Ya know after watching the videos and thinking about it... I'm ok without the gestures on the touchpad. On a phone it makes more sense, you have less screen space so removing the 'back buttons' gives you more to see on screen, but with a tablet you have a lot more screen space so putting the 'back buttons' back on is probably better for everyone... We just don't know it yet. That's what I think. I guess I'll see if I really like come the 1st!!
They added that gesture back, see here http://www.precentral.net/lengthy-touchpad-demo-reveals-reborn-gesture-k...
Flash works great on my Veer. So I think this was a fluke or the network. not the device.
Well he mentioned about the enterprise integration. All well and good. What would be great is if they could tie into the major industry suites. (Outlook, Lotus notes ect). They could have it all seamlessly working as one. They did that it could be a wonderful winner.
Why would you want to integrate it with Outlook when it integrates with Exchange directly?
I use Outlook to store personal contacts and calendar events locally, as well as retrieving my email from Exchange. I communicate with more people than just the ones at my company.
I think a free Touchpad/Pre3, bundle would "Make Things Right" For me, eventhough I doubt this would ever happen... Throw one in for buying the other maybe?
Don't hold your breath.
Maybe a discount on one if you purchase the other but I'm not confident about that either. :(
This is and excellent demo of the touch-pad. And him explaining how everything will be wireless connected and connected to your hps' profile hidden in the cloud just sold me that much more. Now that's cutting technology. As well as being truly innovative. All my webos devices that i will own will be linked to one profile, that is my profile, that is marvelously ingenious. What can beat that right now?
Oops, did any one notice by the end of the video that the Pre3 wasn't placed back on the Touchstone in the right position, and the "charging battery" banner was coming up repeatedly? LOL
Anyway, demo all you like, but I want a Sprint Pre3... Come on HP!
wow great job Sean! awesome demo of the webOS is capable of doing, u should be the spokesman of webOS.
Anyone else catch the "Charging Battery" loop on the pre 3 at the end? Probably wasn't seated properly, but the message kept popping up from the notification area.
I was impressed up until the flash video started running. My heart sank a little. BUT, I know flash runs just fine on the Veer. So, I know this is just a fluke thing.
Still gonna want one!
EDIT: Just saw intellidryad posted this. Good catch, man. ;o)
This guy should make a 20-30 minute video showing EVERYTHING webos can do and explaining deeply what things like TTS can achieve in the future (not just loading web pages)... He talks about how cables won´t be needed anymore, but he doesn´t explain how am I going to transfer my music for instance from my mac to the tablet, or from the tablet to my pre3, or from my mac to the pre3... There are still too many things to be known that I think should be clear at this point, like what apps are inboard, and what new apps are available in the catalog, and what apps they´re working on
Great video though, but incomplete
That was a great demo. This is the guy they need to send around showing how webos works to the various carrier's employees. yeah and it works like nothing else. as HP gets more devices and faster speeds and webos gets better this is definitely the winning slogan. 'works like nothing else.'
On another note. i think we just have to ignore all the naysayers that give their two cents on this site. it's a free country. for some of these characters nothing HP does is acceptable. i have been handling an iPad recently and at least for me it is nothing stupendous. no video for most sites. no true multitasking like your desktop, and definitely not as aesthically sweet as webOS. and i am not just talking as a fanboy. originally i wanted an iphone before i saw webos. this imho is the most aesthetically well designed platform there is in addition to the features webos brings. yeah so we don't have 200,000 apps. for the things most people really do HP is heading in the right direction. that can always change for sure. but for right now they have a winner. nuff said.
ps. launch the Pre3 soon HP my Pre is on its way out.
Agreed with all your points. I went to the Verizon store with my heart set on a Droid ... I walked out with a Pre Plus.
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This has to be one of the best, most comprehensive WebOS and Touchpad demos I've seen! Others are right they should clone this guy and put him everywhere there is a demo! LOL