The ship has long since sailed and android now is almost certainly better than WebOS ever was, but this does make me nostalgic.
I don't know if there's room in the market for WebOS to make any kind of significant resurgence, but considering how many people show interest in tools like React Native and Xamarin for mobile apps these days it might stand a better chance than 2-3 years ago.
[overview image](http://enyojs.com/mochi/Mochi%20panels%20with%20email.png)
[design specs](https://github.com/enyojs/mochi/wiki/Mochi-Designs)
[repo](https://github.com/enyojs/mochi)
It wasn't a duopoly at the time though the first public release of webOS followed Android's by just a few months, Symbian and LiMo/Tizen were still players in potentia, …. And between the innovative yet intuitive interface and web-based tech[0], many people were super excited by webOS.
The issue is the Spring exclusivity (distant third) hurt, Palm flubbed the original hardware quality-wise, and they didn't have the breadth (or balls?) to build a consumer-oriented version (purely software interface) and leave the hardware keyboard behind.
[0] though that also caused real issues wrt performances.
One could also (as was tradition) infinitely hack around most of the Palm Pre line to enable it in the end. Just before HP gave up the webOS ghost, it was a popular homebrew thing to do for a certain contingent.
As for the original hardware, it could have really used time when there really wasn't any time to spare in the competitive landscape.
I also had a (Developer) Pre 2 which was incrementally better, and while that was a nice piece of kit, the Palm Pixi was a horrible misstep (with its minuscule size and--gasp--magnetic headphone jack) I first witnessed at their unveiling in San Francisco. The Pre 3 was the only webOS phone that had a genuine shot left, but the HP Touchpad debacle pretty much sealed it. There was even a smaller HP Touchpad in the works at the time (fully working prototypes are found now and then) to diversify the line.
Quite sad.
Using a Samsung C9 Pro now, which has a 6" screen with a useful 16:9 ratio, so it's wider than the phones now like the Note 8 which is 6.3" but a silly 18.5:9 ratio.
It will, with a bit of fiddling, run Nougat (see https://forum.xda-developers.com/hp-touchpad) but the various pieces of the support tools, ex. novacomm, are decrepit and compiling them on current Linux and toolchain didn't result in a working tool so you have to bodge around with old binary releases. Given how slow the device feels with Marshmallow and then Nougat, I will probably save my pennies for a newer tablet.
As to not booting, they're really hard to brick. They can however run down so that even the battery icon won't show. Try charging it using the original charger or other that can do 2A for a day or two then attempt a hard reset.
I continued using it as a glorified e-reader until the Apple Pencil--taking notes and markup PDFs is what finally made me switch. I wouldn't go back as iOS has finally surpassed what Palm/HP had half a decade ago, but it still holds a place in my heart. Kinda like the Amiga, Commodore 64, and BeOS.
I still have the webos partition and booted it after trying v8 and god how Swift it was(sic). Would love to see the LG version run here too.
I've always wondered why it has been so slow to be adopted for other phones and tablets.
I love my LG webos TV, overall I find the experience better than on my previous TV powered by Android..
Except that WebOS can't read mkv files and VLC is not available either :/
It is sad how app support can kill the usefulness of an US
It's model OLED55B7A
So :
- maybe I am doing it wrong ? I doubt it since it should be pretty straightforward to plugin a HDD, click on video / watch.
- IIRC mkv is just a container, it might be that we are just playing different formats.
That being said according to this https://www.displayspecifications.com/en/model/f32a955 MKV should be supported.
I've got a similar TV and MKV works on mine.
My brother purchased the Pixie. It was kind of neat, too, but... that rubberized backing started pealing off and it started to get pretty gross.
Android widgets like Vista widgets, OSX widgets, or KDE widgets failed at their vision because it's usually easier to open an application when you want one.
The webOS card interface scales to tablet beautifully (I think it was actually better on tablet) and with some additions would scale to desktop as well.
The UI was successful (IMO) because it wasn't actually different. Someone (at Nokia IIRC) once compared iOS navigation to having a house where every door faced outside and you have to go outside to go around to the room you want. Android made the same mistake. Both have taken step after step to deal with the effects without really addressing the cause.
On a desktop, opening apps is secondary. You have a few favorites in your dock for quick access. After that, you either open your start menu or launchpad and go hunting else you Cmd-SPC and type the name. Once you have everything open, switching and managing applications is the name of the game with lots of tools to make this happen.
The default paradigm in webOS is the same. A dock of favorites with an app drawer plus JustType to find less-used apps. Aside from that, managing apps is front-and-center. Compare groups of cards to OSX horizontal spaces. You go from group to group and managing apps is the default. Once again comparing to OSX, webOS has a consistent menu in the upper-left and a settings menu in the upper-right.
Android and iOS now try to mimic this, but it's always a secondary feature. Home is default with app switching being someplace you go to to see your list of 100 "open" apps. Both have decided that users who are perfectly capable of using a menu on their desktop are incapable of doing so on a phone.
Another not really mimicked feature of webOS was its service integration. Having all your different accounts working together in one central place seamlessly is an experience nothing comes close to.
Even comparing to the web they were ahead. EnyoJS was/is a component-based framework. You could compare it to React with manual view updating (which is actually more powerful if less easy on the developer). This was in the backbone, knockout, early angular days.
The flaws of webOS were blatant and fairly fixable. They used Qt for the GUI, but didn't allow native apps to be built using it (and didn't have a native SDK until way after they should have). They use Qt's version of v8 and webkit which were terribly out of date and (as a result) much slower than they should have been. The underlying Linux OS never had even basic optimizations put in place. The hardware was sub-par and memory was too restricted at the time. There were also rough edges in the UI, but nothing worse than iOS or Android at the time.
Today, loads of phones have more than enough memory. The processors are fast. Web standards now have things like wasm or webworkers that make apps much more powerful. This is the time when webOS really could shine.
In a day of 4+GB phones running the fast processors of today, much better web standards w a web phone really is more relevant than ever.
I liked having the CPU/RAM usage widget in a small corner of my secondary monitor on Vista/Win7 as well.
I think the main point is that whether this kind of functionality is in a pull-down menu, a widget, or a gesture away, I like being able to specify a few things that I can access quickly without opening a fullscreen app.
But the OS itself uses Qt and Chromium to display any HTML5 content, as the project page from the linked article states.
This contrasts with, say, Firefox OS - it rendered directly to an OGL-ES framebuffer.
Or even finish the whole sentence before running off to make this comment?
The headstart the Palm folks had in Mobile OS/vision went into WebOS.
If I had the ability to run WebOS on a Pixel or Google device I would seriously consider it.