HP On Palm Acquisition: “Our Intent Is To Double Down On WebOS” | Hacker News Reader

HP On Palm Acquisition: “Our Intent Is To Double Down On WebOS”

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47 pointsnlwhittemore23 comments

WebOS is actually pretty nice to develop for, it just needs faster hardware with better battery life. Oh, and a way for developers to make money. It's a little rough that anyone can just shell into their phone and view all of your source code.

Is Palm's hardware roughly comparable with average Android and Apple phones? (thus making it the software that's slow and power-hungry, not the hardware?) I've just heard so many people complain that the "everything is web" aspect of it makes it slow, but I don't know whether that's just a scapegoat or if it's really true.

The Pre isn't as fast as the top of the line Android phones, but it's no slouch either. It holds its own in most side by side comparisons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7FJj5-7vQI

I believe the Palm Pre, the Motorola Droid, the Nokia N900 (and in non-phone contexts the Open Pandora handheld and Beagleboard) all use the same TI OMAP3 board.

> a way for developers to make money

I'm not terribly familiar with webOS/palm ecosystem, hence the question: what's the usual channel for selling a webOS app? all this cloud talk etc, does that mean you can chuck up a web site/app targeted at webOS and start charging for it?

If you wanted to, sure. Palm also has an App Store. IIRC, they just entered into a bunch of EU markets.

thanks

re: battery life

Since, 1.4.1, I think things have changed. I get 3 days out of a full charge now which is close to making me forget my blackberry.

Maybe we'll finally see a legitimate competitor for the iPad now. All of a sudden, the market just got a little interesting.

Good for them! WebOS, as I understand it, is the nicest OS of the bunch from an elegance and openness perspective, so it's good to see it getting a fair shot at market dominance.

Exciting stuff -- let's just hope the additional fragmentation is worth it.

The fragmentation is good. The phone market is much healthier than the PC market. A handful of profitable platforms means heavy competition and innovation: a big win for consumers (and developers). I hope HP does well in the phone market, as I wish the peddlers of Android phones and Apple success as well. Plenty of money to spread around in that market.

Too much fragmentation sucks. It means none of them will gain critical mass and at least half of them will spend several painful years slowly failing. I don't see how any of these guys (Symbian, WebOS, etc.) hope to overcome Android & WinPhone, at least in the smart phone market. All they can do is harm them by distracting and confusing the market for a few years, equating to consolidation for Apple. I know I am certainly not going to write apps for 5 platforms. I will pick 2 and go with that.

The majority of them are Linux-based, and all of them make heavy use of the same web technologies for the primary part of the user experience. The exception is WinMo, but I can't believe that they're going to last long at all with IE7 as their browser of choice. They're going to need to either light a fire under the IE9 team and somehow get feature parity with mobile Webkit, or just throw in the towel and allow one of the other browsers on WinMo.

And as for the suggestion that Apple is going to take over... RIM still has the largest market share in the US. Apple is a niche player, and they always will be because of the premium they charge on their hardware (now further compounded by the restrictions imposed on their hardware.)

I've never had a phone with Windows Mobile, but I use to have a PDA woth that OS and I could run both Minimo (Gecko based) and Opera on it.

With WinMo 7 all apps must be coded in Silverlight, and there is no native development. This might be okay if they weren't using IE7 as the basis for the WinMo 7 browser.

Different focuses. The iPhone's a mediocre PDA when looking at its calendaring and contact management facilities; my old Palm Pilot did a much better job. I haven't tried Android, but I don't imagine it being much better.

While we may see smartphones take over completely, with multimedia, web browsing, email, etc. I suspect we'll see different design choices made for different types of users. That'll provide space for several competitors.

WebOS apps are mostly written using web technologies (HTML/CSS/JS) so I don't see this as a negative fragmentation. Of course, competing with the App Store is still going to be difficult, but the theoretical barrier of writing an app for webOS (learn web technology) is lower than that for iPhone (learn Obj-C/Cocoa).

I love my Pre. Great new innovative ui, and excellent browsing experience.

The first thing came to my mind reading the headline was:

"What does KFC have anything to do with HP or Palm?"

Is using a gambling term to describe a business acquisition supposed to calm shareholder fears/concerns of risk?

Clearly that one didn't go through the normal PR approval process.

maybe they think embracing the obvious is the way to go

You double down when you expect the odds favour a dealer bust.

I'm not sure how anyone suggesting that Apple, Google and RIM busting shouldn't be feared, if that's what they actually mean.

This shareholder is far more spooked by vague platitudes that have obviously been through the PR filter a dozen times and are devoid of meaning. Once that is all you hear, then you should start to worry.

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