The Next Web is reporting that their source close to HP revealed that WebOS ran almost twice as fast on the iPad in attest conducted by them. Its not sure why they did that test. But its obvious that it wasn’t completely the software failure why TouchPad didn’t do well. Even the web apps did better on Apple’s tablet. The team loaded WebOS as a web app inside Mobile Safari on the iPad 2 and it was running many times faster in the browser than it did natively on the TouchPad. Pretty embarrassing!!
So the blame goes to the hardware. The TouchPad runs a 1.2GHz dual core Snapdragon APQ8060, and the specs are pretty much from Palm’s original tablet plan from around two years back. The WebOS engineers inside HP were apparently very vocal about it and wanted the hardware gone, since it was slow and stopped them from innovating beyond a point.
HP has just announced that they are stopping all WebOS devices, though they say they are still committed to the platform and may license it to other manufacturers. A 7 inch TouchPad Go and a slimmer, higher res TouchPad were also in the works, so no idea what happens to those now. If some other company picks it up with decent hardware, we would love to see it. Stay tuned.
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: thenextweb.com, macrumors.com, slashgear.com.
