Author’s Note: This is a review that came out in January 2006. This was an awkward time for Palm. Its success with the m515 followed by the discontinuation of the Tungsten series and the creation of the LifeDrive line would be their slow road to perdition – not just for them but for their loyal users who really wanted to keep within the Palm ecosystem.
EDIT: Since the annoucement, the HP TouchPad is now being sold at a happy USD 0.00. If you have a friend from the USA coming home to the PH, I suggest grabbing one!
If I were you, try to find someone with a mint webOS device. Then find a way to get Manny Pacquiao to sign it. Re-seal it and keep it in mothballs for the time when your toddler reaches manhood so he can sell it for lots of money.
Sad to see webOS go. But really, with the huge dominance of Android and iOS, there really seems to be no more space for a new app ecosystem to thrive. Looks like HP pulled the plug sooner than later.
There seems to be a huge curse put on this particular OS. For avid fans, this isn’t the first time the platform has been canned. In the beginning, Palm’s success led to the spawning of a quasi sister company / competitor called Handspring that was more focused on hardware attachment modules to Palm OS-licensed devices. Handspring was later on re-acquired. Then Palm had a bit of identity crisis, changing their name to palmOne and then back to Palm and then selling to HP to reincarnate as webOS. And then now HP doesn’t seem to know what to do with them. Oh well. Palm is the equivalent of the cursed Defense of the Dark Arts teaching position of the tech world.
Look what I found! from the ashes, this is my Targus Stowaway Foldable Keyboard compatible with the Handspring Visor series. I think I bought this in 2001 and used it with a Visor Deluxe wihch I then upgraded to a second hand Visor Prism (with 16-bit color!).
The foldable keyboard was an engineering marvel back in the day and not too many people owned one. Did you own a foldable keyboard for your Palm / Windows Mobile device? I remember this cost around PHP 3,500.00 or so with this particular model tough to get as there weren’t as many Handspring devices compared to Palm in Manila.