"HP ruins everything."

That's what P said last night on IM after sending me the link to this article, which is liable to make me grumpy for the whole weekend. About the only upside will be that by the time I can actually spare the money for gadgets again, I'll be able to get a TouchPad for firesale prices; the odds of somebody else licensing WebOS and trying to succeed where HP failed are, by my reckoning, slim and none.

To be honest, though, I don't know what HP could have done differently to make a success out of the TouchPad. Well, not releasing test samples before it was ready for prime-time would have helped, I'm sure, but the basic problem was that HP brought a great product to market long after Apple and Google had pretty much split the tablet market between them, and didn't have a killer app to break into the market with. Sure, WebOS allowed the TouchPad to do things in concert with the Pixi, Pre and Veer that can't be done with either iOS or Android devices, but in the end it just wasn't enough, especially in an economy like this.

I guess I'll resign myself to getting a Droid phone once the Pixi dies, and probably just give up on the notion of a tablet at all. For considerably less money, I can get a pretty decent laptop, which may be a priority since I suspect Cowzilla isn't going to last much longer.