HP to RIM: Our iPad Challenger Is More Original Than Your iPad Challenger

March 2, 2011 at 3:00 am PT

Isn’t this ironic. Hewlett-Packard and Research in Motion, two companies that haven’t officially launched their first tablets yet, talking smack to one another the day before Apple debuts its second.

Evidently, HP feels RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook UI borrows pretty heavily from the webOS operating system on which its TouchPad will run, and it is more than happy to say so publicly.

“There are some uncanny similarities,” HP’s Jon Oakes told LapTop. “It’s a fast innovation cycle and a fast imitation cycle in this market, so we just know that we have the creative engine here to continue to build on what we have, and we’ll keep innovating, we’ll keep honing and those guys hopefully will continue to see the value in it and keep following us by about a year.”

RIM’s rebuttal? To claim that the PlayBook’s QNX OS developed organically, despite its WebOS Cards-style multitasking interface, and to suggest that similarities between the two operating systems are inevitable. “You know, cars over time end up looking a lot alike because you put them through a wind tunnel, and when you’re trying to come up with the best coefficient to drag ratio, there’s one optimized shape that gets the best wind resistance, right? Well, when you’re trying to optimize user experience that juggles multitasking, multiple apps open at once and on a small screen, you’re going to get people landing on similar kinds of designs.”

A diplomatic argument, and one that does make some sense. Design similarities are likely inevitable in a market like this one.

Particularly if you’re the one that established it in the first place.

Sadly, neither HP or RIM can claim that, because the TouchPad and PlayBook aren’t even available yet. But Apple can. And later today, after it laps HP and RIM a second time with the next iteration of the iPad, this little spat will look even sillier than it already does.

Tagged with: Apple, hardware, Hewlett-Packard, innovation, iPad, iPad 2, John Paczkowski, PlayBook, QNX, Research In Motion, RIM, TouchPad, WebOS

comments so far. Add yours.

Anonymous

HP’s Jon Oakes said

“There are some uncanny similarities. It’s a fast innovation cycle and a fast imitation cycle in this market, so we just know that we have the creative engine here to continue to build on what we have, and we’ll keep innovating, we’ll keep honing and those guys hopefully will continue to see the value in it and keep following us by about a year.”

Are you sure it wasn’t Apple’s Jon Oakes?

Although, I guess in that case he would have said following us by a couple of years, and been right.
Anonymous

If the iPad 2 has the same stale old app selector OS with it’s horrid notification system and pitiful excuse for multitasking, I’ll gladly wait for the Touchpad or Playbook.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_NIYCXCBOK5QBBPA6XQQBSL4RJQ Rocmon

mud slinging is lame at this level… lets just enjoy the various products coming to market :)
Anonymous

Excellent! Love to see the Dr. Seuess characters. Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!!
Anonymous

“If the iPad 2 has the same stale old app selector OS with it’s horrid notification system and pitiful excuse for multitasking, I’ll gladly wait for the Touchpad or Playbook.”

Yeah, let’s all go out & buy the Playbook & Touchpad!

Where can we buy them?

Oh, that’s right—-nowhere.

Ayuh
John Peters

You can’t buy the iPad 2 either so what’s your argument? Did you not read what he said? He said “I’ll gladly WAIT for the Touchpad or Playbook.” I wouldn’t buy the iPad 2 either. It’s going to be DOA when compared to the power of the other tablets on the market.
Anonymous

The iPad seems just fine for the average consumer, who wants a reasonable price and a product that meets their news. I know notifications and multitasking is important for your illegal activities, PimpLucious, but maybe eliminating your ability to “ho track” while playing Scrabble or letting you know that you just received an e-mail from a former New York governor is a good thing. For those of us involved in only legal activities, the iPad multitasking has been working just fine SINCE NOVEMBER.

But hey, enjoy your waiting.
Anonymous

What he meant is that so far both the Playbook & the TouchPad aren’t available nor do we REALLY know when they’ll come out or even if they’ll EVER come out. Saying “we have one” and having one is different. What we know is that the iPad 1 exists and iPad 2 is about to “exist” and we’ll be able to BUY one instead of dreaming about it.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_47XHGLZVO6IUYLMWVUYFVN5LQU Dr No

iPad 2 is going to be DOA?? HAHAHA! You know you’re reading the delusional ramblings of a Fandroid, RIMjobber or die-hard Apple hater when you come across something this patently stupid.
Anonymous

Or in this case, the two products not yet coming to market.
Anonymous

yes, because the best selling consumer products always sell based on the “power”.

you’re must be a consumer electronics genius, i hope you charge a lot of money for your infinite wisdom.
http://twitter.com/localseoguide Andrew Shotland

Zax +1!
http://diskgrinder.blogspot.com Anonymous

I for one, welcome our nascent squabbling overlords, when they finally arrive
Anonymous

> You can’t buy the iPad 2 either so what’s your argument?

But you can buy an iPad2 starting next Friday, March 11.
macartisan

“You know, cars over time end up looking a lot alike because you put them through a wind tunnel…”

Yeah, except the design team that actually HAS a wind tunnel (in the form of a shipping product) isn’t HP or RIM.
http://www.innovize.com.sg Mike Langton

Not much headwind to tunnel-test a UI against. Plenty of hot air though.

Apple is leading a lucrative category it created while the rest were doing low-margin “Better Sameness”.

The combination of UI, hardware specs, design, apps ecosystem and user insights which made iPad a success isn’t really a hallmark of the other players.

Let’s hope they lift their game. We’ll all benefit.
Anonymous

Yeah, I saw this and thought it was pathetic. They are measuring the lengths of imaginary penises.

Not only do both TouchPad and PlayBook owe almost everything to iPad, but the rest they owe to Mac OS X. The cards UI they are arguing over is half CoverFlow and half Exposé. Both of these devices not only use Apple’s Web browser core, they both draw their entire interfaces with it.

It was only a few months ago RIM was saying they have raised the bar in (imaginary) tablets with a dual core ARM SoC. So embarrassing.
Anonymous

The reason the OS interface is built around an “app selector” is there are hundreds of thousands of powerful native C apps, and that is where the user spends her time.

Having iMovie and GarageBand (for $4.99 each) and so many other PC-class native C apps on iPad is better than having Honeycomb’s PC-style UI with a baby Java app platform. Apps are everything on a tablet. iPad doesn’t have to pretend to be a PC, there is a PC version called the Mac. A MacBook Air is only $200 more than a XOOM and has double the CPU, graphics, RAM, and flash storage, as well as a full Unix and over 200 open source projects and 25,000 widgets. I understand Honeycomb’s PC envy, but it doesn’t make for a good tablet.

The idea that Android multitasks better than iOS is completely ridiculous. You simply don’t know what you are talking about.
Anonymous

It’s called competition. The PC industry is allergic to it, but this is not the PC industry. Both HP and RIM are embarrassing themselves and deserve to be called out.
ThinkingOutLoud4

webOS may not yet be available on a tablet, but it’s been successfully running on production handsets since June 2009. The same cannot be said for the RIM OS. iOS has a big lead, but the others have opportunities to provide user experiences that follow other paths to meet customer requests and requirements.

HP to RIM: Our iPad Challenger Is More Original Than Your iPad Challenger

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