Messages, Camera, Maps, Photos, Clock, Music, Phone, Safari, App Store, iTunes, and Settings. That’s eleven out of the twenty seven that come preinstalled on the iPhone. But unlike Thomas Ricker and BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel, I don’t think it’s much of a threat to Apple. Every mobile platform has this problem and I doubt it affects Apple any more than Android.
In addition to the missing Photos and Timelapse watch faces I mentioned in my piece from last week, Thomas Ricker points out that the Apple Watch is also missing the walkie-talkie feature announced in September. Personally, I’m actually quite happy that Apple decided to remove the feature — I remember how annoying it was being stuck in the same room as someone who loved the Nextel push-to-talk functionality. I hope Apple has enough sense to forget they ever mentioned it.
There’s been a lot of rumors published recently regarding HP’s webOS event on February 9. It started when Engadget’s Nilay Patel published rendered images of the upcoming “Topaz” webOS tablet.
The 9-inch Topaz is said to be just one of two tablets announced at the event. There will also be a 7-inch tablet codenamed Opal. The rendered device on Engadget’s site looks quite nice. It’s similar in design to the iPhone 3GS, just blown up to 9-inches. There’s a front-facing camera, micro USB, and a three speaker arrangement that Nilay Patel speculates would allow for stereo audio in both portrait and landscape orientations.
But, that was just the beginning. The following day Thomas Ricker reported that Topaz and Opal would have inductive charging and that HP would be offering large amounts of cloud storage for the devices. This cloud storage would “dwarf” the local storage of the devices and could store apps and app states. This could allow users to seamlessly switch from tablet to handset without having to deliberately transfer data.
However, all of Engadget’s rumors were trumped by Dieter Bohn who managed to get his hands on inductive charging details and the HP Topaz specifications.
The new tablet-compatible inductive charger will be named the “Touchstone v2” and may allow for wireless audio streaming over Bluetooth, wireless video streaming to VGA or HDMI out, and wireless gaming using your television as a display and the tablet as a controller. The Touchstone v2 sounds more like HP’s answer to the Apple TV than it does a wireless charging dock for tablets. The video gaming angle could be huge and I hope that HP has managed to secure content partners to go along with their wireless video streaming feature.
The target specifications that Dieter Bohn obtained are as follows:
The specifications are better than the iPad all around (aside from the battery life). Which makes it clear that HP has designed Topaz to compete with the iPad 2, not just to play catch-up with the current iPad. HP is really swinging for the fences with this announcement, and I hope they’re successful. It’s clear that HP knows where the industry is headed and their acquisition of Palm put them right where they needed to be development-wise. All that’s left is to bring devices to market and sell as many of them as possible. And, HP is ready to do just that.
HP CEO Leo Apotheker recently spoke with the BBC’s Tim Weber about the future of the company. Regarding product announcement timelines:
“HP will stop making announcements for stuff it doesn’t have. When HP makes announcements, it will be getting ready to ship,” he promises, saying the products launched on 9 February will be on sale just a few weeks later.
“A few weeks later” sounds perfect to me. That will put the release date before the RIM PlayBook and likely before the Motorola Xoom.
Thomas Ricker reporting for Engadget:
At the heart is HTCSense.com, a series of dashboard-connected services for backup, security, and control of your HTC handset. A new locate feature triggers the handset to ring loudly (even when set to silent) while flagging its location on an online map. If the phone was lost or stolen, owners can remote lock and/or wipe the phone. Backups will automatically archive your contacts, text messages, call history, customizations and data.
So, HTC has announced a MobileMe competitor and I only have one question: Why did HTC — not Google — do this?
