The big brother to the HP Veer, the Pre 3, is now slated for an August 31 release date according to Play.com. While this still falls into the “summer season” promised by HP, previous reports suggested we’d see the webOS flagship by mid-July. Without the Pre 3, touch to share with the HP TouchPad remains a pipe dream unless you own the Veer. Will a late August release of the HP Pre 3 spell disaster for webOS?
Yesterday HP’s webOS boss Jon Rubinstein sent out an internal letter of support to both the TouchPad engineers and the webOS 3.0 development team. In the letter he reminds that, “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” when it comes to refining webOS and the TouchPad. Unfortunately history has proven time is not on the side of the underdog. Coming to market last and offering an unfinished OS are hardly ingredients for success.
At CES 2009 Palm announced the Pre and webOS. It took six months before the phone came to fruition, launching only days after Apple’s WWDC convention. We thought Palm learned its lesson from these two critical mistakes. Apparently that’s not the case and the HP Pre 3 will be a repeat offender with a six and a half month gap between announcement and launch.
By late August, an army of bigger, better and faster Android smartphones will be the talk of the town — not to mention the fifth generation iPhone. HP needs to realize that six months is a lifetime in smartphones. If you want a successful product launch cut the time between announcement and release to three months.
