HP’s $99 Tablet Fiasco

Thanks to David for sending this out to me!

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2011 was a wild time to be a webOS user. In a span of just 49 days, HP released the platform's first tablet - and then stopped making webOS hardware altogether. Today we're going to unbox the company's very short lived answer to the iPad, and the efforts made to keep it alive after HP pulled the plug.

Chapters:
00:00 - Setting the scene...
00:33 - Some backstory
04:53 - Unboxing
07:24 - Trouble in paradise
10:29 - webOS demo
23:21 - Android situation was crazy
26:03 - Booting into Android
28:06 - Outro

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● Music/Credits:

Background Music:
"A Kiss For Amanda", "Blue Mood", and "Walk Through the Park" from the YouTube Audio Library

Outro Music: Silent Partner - Bet On It

Some materials in this video are used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, which allows "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, and research.

#MichaelMJD #webOS #TouchPad

[Madblaster]

I worked as an HP rep at the time. The immediately discounted it on release day and I bought 3. It was worth it because you could install cyanogen mod on it at the time.

[EdgyShooter]

That is ridiculously smooth for the era, not just compared to the Android tablets of the time, but even to the iPad!

[guesswho]

I'm glad basically every mobile OS has since ripped off the webOS multitasking UI because it was so much better than any of the competition back in 2009-2011.

[hdwblade]

I can't stand that WebOS died, forced into a TV only OS. LOOK HOW INCREDIBLY SMOOTH IT This is what, 10+ year old hardware and it's faster than budget Android phones. It blows my mind and pains me that they didn't try selling the OS to other companies before killing it. If the phones weren't the size of a tamagotchi, WebOS would rule the smartphone world!

[FenixQubes]

This thing is much quicker/smoother than I thought. I thought this was going to be a total piece of junk. For $99 in 2011 that was quite the deal.

[alexnoyle]

WebOS is the greatest mobile operating system of all time. I will never forgive HP for what they did.

[gatto]

Wow webOS has aged really well. It's polished and runs smoothly while using an early design language that reminds me a lot of what later IOS versions and GNOME would have.

[BlairAir]

I love it. Reminds me of when i had an HP Journada. HP Support instructed me to do something that bricked it, then hurried off the phone when he realized what he did. I began an email campaign to Carly Fiorona's office that, after one particular 200 email blast, netted me a call, saying, "we are going to replace your Journada, " to which i graciously and humbly replied "I KNOW YOU ARE. Because I will never ever go away until you do!" Good times!

[pansageyt]

2011 - whole tablet and polishing cloth with hp logo for $99
2024 - polishing cloth with apple logo for $99

[KZA]

The developer mode activation must be the coolest way I've seen in a while 13:54

[dustojnikhummer]

This looks a lot smoother than Android 3.

[mikeiswhite]

0:10 49 days, that's also the amount of time Liz Truss was Prime Minister

[virt-manager]

WebOS is still alive but only on LG Televisions today😅

[tarheels]

5:53 You could say HP really threw in the towel with this one.

[laughyourashevilleoff]

Still lasted longer than Concord on PS5, lol.

[justayoutuber]

When HP decided to sell of the inventory of tablets in a fire sale in Sept of 2011, they did not have a credit card machine to take the payments - it was only cash. They had huge lines of people lined up in Sunnyvale and at the end of the day had hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in an unsecured office park building. They eventually had to get security guards.

[KORUPTable]

I'm 100% sure Action Retro is your brother and you two make the same videos

[VirtualAxiom]

This is SO much nicer aesthetically than modern operating systems, mobile or otherwise. (Yes, it pains me to not consider the year I started college "modern" anymore...) The shift to "minimalism" and "material design" was a mistake. Computers used to have personality in their UIs, but now everything looks so corporate, and we're lucky to be getting color gradients and rounded corners back instead of the flat, ugly pastel squares everyone was obsessed with in the 2010s. You only see this kind of artistic effort in icons and UI elements for some Linux themes these days, but nothing that's shipped by default.

[swolfington]

I bought one of these when they firesale'd them. The HP web store was getting hit so hard by everyone that i spent hours hitting f5 or whatever till i managed to get an order in. It was a pretty cool tablet all things considered, and for 99 bucks it was a crazy good deal.

[Totyamuri]

A 99$ tablet had Calculator sooner than iPads