Hewlett-Packard is taking mixed reviews for its new TouchPad tablet with webOS pretty seriously, going by a leaked internal memo from the head of HP’s Palm Global Business Unit to staff that declares it will be “a marathon not a sprint” to fix the initial shortcomings of the device.
John Rubenstein, senior vice president and general manager of HP’s Palm unit, sent the memo on July 1, the day the TouchPad was officially released in the U.S. It was apparently leaked by an anonymous tipster to Pre Central, a specialist tech website covering HP’s mobile business.
While the memo cites The New York Times reviewer David Pogue’s opinion that the TouchPad shows “signs of greatness,” Rubenstein also concedes that Pogue and other “reviewers rightly note things we need to improve about the webOS experience.”
That’s a tacit admission that the TouchPad has a long way to go in areas like app availability and user friendliness before it lives up to one HP executive’s pre-release boast that the tablet would take on Apple’s market-dominating iPad and “become better than number one.”
PCMag’s Lead Analyst for Audio and Video Timothy Gideon didn’t disagree with Rubenstein’s assessment (reprinted below), offering up the “general feeling that the good outweighs the bad with the TouchPad.” Our full review of the tablet offers much the same sentiment.
Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard is planning to follow up on its Wi-Fi-only, 16GB and 32GB TouchPads with a “white glossy” model due out in August that sports a more powerful processor and 64GB of internal storage, as well as a 32GB TouchPad with support for AT&T’s 4G HSPA+ network in the same August timeframe, according to leaked HP product roadmap slides, also published this week by Pre Central.
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