To our surprise, when we fired up our firesale HP TouchPad yesterday, it said there was a WebOS update available.
Sure enough, HP released an update for the discontinued table. The over-the-air update to WebOS 3.0.4 indicated it would take 15 minutes to download and install, but in our case took less than 10 minutes.
HP says the update will make the system ‘snappier’. It also includes a new camera app, an improved system for searching for apps, adds the ability to add songs to a playlist from Album view, adds support for OGG Verbis and FLAC media files, and adds a way to pair non-webOS phones to the touchpad, amongst other features.
“We have a big number of TouchPads out there, and we wanted to continue serving users and developers. We improved performance, added better support for the camera, made connectivity with non-HP phones possible, improved messaging, touched the UI in many places, etc.” wrote Ari Jaaksi, the Senior Vice President of webOS at HP on his blog.
Jaaksi also said that HP is continuing with the long term architectural development of webOS. He blogged “WebOS is a good operating system. I’ve done my own polls lately, too. I can see many TouchPad’s in Starbucks, Peets, and other such places. I often go and ask a user what they think about it. I’m getting very positive feedback!”
As for the possibility of more HP TouchPads becoming available in the future? Jaaksi added the very first comment to his own blog, saying:
“P.S. No, I don’t have a tablet for you.
P.P.S. No, I don’t have news about that.”
About a month ago, HP said that a last run of HP TouchPads were being manufactured to meet unfilled demand. At that time, they said the tablets would be available within a few weeks. However, they added that they could not promise that they would have enough for everyone.