And I Barely Got to Test WebOS….

Wow. At Blogher a couple of weeks ago, the AT&T Phone Fairy was on hand passing out phones to those that she spotted with old, out-of-date, or broken down phones. I was given one to check out during my panel. Guess what she was passing out? Yep.. a WebOS device! An HP Veer to be exact. I wonder how many*lucky* people were the recipients of a phone that is now suddenly obsolete?  I know of at least 3 others that got them.

I’m sure by now you have heard that HP decided to can all devices based on WebOS. This includes the barely released HP TouchPad which was drawing a lot of attention as a possible iPad killer. I guess that prediction was wrong!

Honestly, WebOS seems pretty solid and I have heard good things about it. But, that is not enough in business. The numbers did not match up. It is reported that only 25,000 TouchPad units were sold in Best Buy which was only 9.3% of the 270,000 in stock in USA stores.  It is tough competition against the Apple iPad and many up and coming Android devices.

HP did not say that WebOS was completely going away, just that they will no longer be manufacturing the hardware to run the OS. This is a complete turn around from what some may have been expecting out of the promising HP TouchPad.

This is not the first time we have been shocked about the demise of a cool gadget. It was not too long ago that Cisco announced that they were no longer going to manufacture the Flip. But, that was an item that was doing really well in terms of sales.

In other news, HP  also reports that they *may* sell their PC manufacturing division. Now this is a real shock to me. I am very interested in hearing more details on that.