HP still hasn’t officially announced a launch date for its upcoming webOS tablet, but Digitimes reports that the HP TouchPad could ship in late March or early April.
DigiTimes often gets scoops like these by talking to industry sources in Taiwan, so there’s a god reason to believe the prediction. We already know that HP doesn’t want to wait too long to launch the tablet, with CEO Leo Apotheker saying the company plans to ship products shortly after their introduction. HP unveiled the TouchPad at an event on February 9th.
The TouchPad will be the first table to ship with the webOS 3.0 operating system. It has a 9.67 inch, 1024 x 768 pixel display and weighs 1.6 pounds. The tablet has a 1.2 GHz dual core Qualcomm Snapdrgon processor, 512MB of RAM and up to 32GB of storage. A WiFi-only version is expected at launch, with 3G and 4G models set to follow.
Web OS is dead in the water and they are lowering the lifeboats now. I encouraged my wife (who is a physician) to purchase a Pre over a year ago because the older Palm OS/devices had always served her well. This month Epocrates pulled support, killing the product for healthcare. When you lose application support like that, your a zombie. I would not encourage anyone to risk stranding themselves with this product.
Sounds like they ramped up production after HP’s CEO said it was taking too long from product announcement to launch.