Comment by fuzionmonkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fuzionmonkey | Hacker News Reader

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Some things about WebOS are absolutely fantastic. My first smartphone was a Pre Plus when it came out on Verizon for like $40.

The software was pretty great. The multitasking was perfect, Synergy was awesome. It wasn't quite as polished in some areas as iOS, but some things were also drastically superior. Also the inductive charging was awesome as well.

I got an iPhone on Verizon when it came out, and I really miss the multitasking. But what I don't miss is the hardware.

My Pre was literally starting to fall apart. It was all cheap, flimsy plastic, not durable at all. The difference in build quality of the iPhone was astonishing. And dramatic noticeable speed improvement.

WebOS was crippled by its horrible hardware. The software was competitive, even the best at times, but the Pre was just terrible hardware. It didn't have very fast specs, and the phone itself wasn't durable or high quality.

Agreed, webOS suffers from some small-ish fit and finish problems, and much larger marketing and (lack of) application problems.

webOS 1.0 did do a lot of wacky/strange things that were annoying, though not bad enough for the phone to be useless. As well as the hardware problems, you'd get stuff like like the alarm going off a minute before it was supposed to (going by the phone's own time display). It would also repeatedly tell you every few minutes that it was unable to send an email message when no network was available.

They're reduced the number of annoyances in webOS 2.0, though, so I am hopeful for the Pre 3. (It also now has close to acceptable performance, instead of completely unacceptable performance.)

The marketing and app problems are much more difficult to solve; I'm not sure what they can do there. Throwing money at it, maybe...

I own an original Pré from Sprint. The first six months, I ran it overclocked to 1 GHz when the screen was on and it worked reasonably. After the first six months, the hardware started falling apart: power button stopped working, volume buttons were always depressed, phone calls were never routed to the earpiece, etc.

If HP could put WebOS on quality hardware, it would be a killer device. Here's hoping the Pré3 can do it.

My wife has the original palm pre from sprint, and I love the software and system in general. The hardware has been what has kept me away from it (it's the lack of a software keyboard for me personally). Compared to my android experience, the pre seems much more polished.

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