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You can understand more and change your cookies preferences here. Technology giant HP has announced major plans to restructure the company, discontinuing its months-old tablet product and mobile phone lines and selling-off its personal computer business.
In a Wall Street Journal interview earlier this week, Stephen DeWitt, senior vice president and general manager of its WebOS global business unit, reportedly said there's an "enormous amount of interest" in WebOS but didn't identify the companies involved. It's one thing to have a smartphone, but what about applications that run on all sorts of different things that create experiences that we haven't even envisioned yet?
Google claimed multiple times that its acquisition was important for Motorola's valuable trove of software patents, which would help protect Google from the deluge of lawsuits the company is currently facing. In the wake of this week's news, all eyes are now on key mobile players Microsoft, Nokia and RIM -- the three major companies trailing clear mobile industry leaders Apple and Google -- to see which OS will take on iOS and Android.
HP just answered that question. View Iframe URL. It wouldn't nab the back to school shoppers, or compete with any scheduled iPad release. At the time it also seemed like an awfully long way off.
Then, on July 1, the TouchPad was released to mild fanfare and curiosity. It was immediately scorned for a lack of apps, sluggish performance, clunky user experience, and frequent errant keyboard presses. But the news wasn't all bad. Many users liked them, and average user ratings on the Best Buy website if they can be believed were on par with the iPad 2 's ratings. But still sales weren't picking up. In just five weeks HP dropped the price of the TouchPad drastically to entice buyers.
But consumers didn't bite, and reports came in that many were waiting for yet another price cut. Reports began coming in that Best Buy had sold less than 10 percent of their inventory of , TouchPads and was trying to sell them back to HP to no avail.
Meanwhile, Apple had sold 9 million iPads the previous quarter and were backordered for weeks. Apple couldn't make units fast enough, and TouchPads were starting to look like bricks in store inventories.
Before the news of distressed inventory at Best Buy made big news, HP had already come to a decision. We have made the difficult but necessary decision to shut down the WebOS hardware operations.
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