HP's Jaaksi and Rubinstein Defend WebOS

Posted By: Kris Keilhack Tuesday, July 12, 2011 1:04:22 PM

touchpad Now that the TouchPad has been on retail shelves for nearly two weeks, a growing number of complaints from both professional reviewers and users alike have prompted HP to respond to various criticisms leveled at the first WebOS tablet.

HP's Senior VP of WebOS Ari Jaaksi took to his personal blog to address some of the complaints voiced online. He states that many of the device's performance issues stem from users hammering the TouchPad with the day 1 setup routines and from copying tens of gigabytes of locally-stored data. He does admit that "we do not handle the situation as well as we should and WebOS may get sluggish. We need to clearly improve the system performance especially when setting up new accounts and downloading a lot of data".

The lack of apps is also addressed, with a "quality over quantity" approach as well as restating the need to work more diligently with developers to produce tablet-friendly WebOS apps. Misspellings of words that are contractions in the TouchPad's dictionary such as "don't" and "won't" are also addressed, attributing those misspellings to the developers' native tongues not being English.

Earlier this month, Jon Rubinstein took a similar stance but far less public route in an internal HP staff email (that was later leaked to Precentral) to touch upon the initial crop of negative TouchPad reviews. Ruby assured his team members that greatness is indeed possible from WebOS and a steady stream of OTA updates arriving "soon" would address the most glaring performance issues while additions to the app catalog will increase the variety of programs available for the platform. He then goes on to describe that the initial reviews of Apple's OS X in 2001 were also far from flattering, yet Rubinstein's former employer continued tweaking and improving the OS enough to make it the basis of a line of industry-leading Macs and iOS mobile devices.

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