The
Hewlett-Packard TouchPad
tablet computer features
Palm Computing's
WebOS. After the
netbook-tablet shift, development of tablets were accelerated and many were rushed to market. Few, however, could match the combination of marketing and accelerated schedule that the TouchPad had. Hewlett-Packard announced the the forthcoming of the tablet in a February 9th, 2011
press release, with placement in
Dr. Dre's
I Need a Doctor music video. The tablet was released July 1st within the
United States, and on August 18th the tablet was cancelled.
October 18th saw the TouchPad get an
OTA system upgrade, which confused the mourning users.
Despite its short life, the fact that it was sold ad a significant discount upon its cancellation (half of the estimated material cost) lead to a frantic purchasing frenzy. With dual-core 1.5GHz
Snapdragon processors and 1GB of
RAM, the system is more portable and more powerful than a similarly priced
netbook. It has its own
repository of software called
Preware, and is more than capable of running most
GNU/
Linux software which is accessible through either a
Debian or
Ubuntu chroot.