More Fail from HP

HP’s TouchPad Follies have gone from sad to comic:

On that note, The Next Web reports that HP engineers had gone as far as to test webOS running on an iPad, finding that the operating system ran “over twice as fast” on the iPad 2 as it did on the TouchPad for which it had been designed. Even running as a web app within the iPad 2’s Safari browser yielded substantially better performance than on the TouchPad…

The report notes that the TouchPad hardware had essentially already been designed when HP acquired Palm last year, with the engineers tasked with getting webOS running on the existing design. The resulting handicap of outdated hardware reportedly crippled the webOS team’s ability to innovate for the tablet platform and ultimately led to the poor market reception.

The problem wasn’t WebOS, after all — designed by Palm a couple years ago. Now HP’s decision to get out of the hardware business makes a lot more sense. The biggest PC maker in the world was in over its head.