I still remember my Palm Pre and the first version of WebOS. I sometimes wonder how much different the phone OS world would look like if Palm didn't choose Spring as their exclusive partner and commit their other fatal mistakes.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5fy6wczeh5sugeg/palm_timeline.png?...
> On August 18, 2011, 49 days after the TouchPad was launched in the United States, HP announced that it would discontinue all current devices running webOS. Remaining TouchPad stock received substantial price reductions, and quickly sold out
The designs exist on GitHub somewhere. I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to implement them as a front end design language?
To any company in trouble, and in need of innovation, this is the perfect strategy. Inevitable Wikipedia link...
Jeffrey Hawkins, the inventor of the palm, has a bit of a cult following almost designers. Far more respected that Johny ‘Dieter Rams’ Ives. His prototyping process was unique. (Now widely copied). Check out his wooden (!) Palm prototypes...
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/...
https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-insi...
We'd all be much better off today if they hadn't had made those fatal errors
I also remember the really natural way that Palm let you ignore an phone call by placing the phone face down to silence a call you didn’t want to pick up.
Heck, even the notification screen and widgets screen is an evolution of the Today.prc from PalmOS days.
I need to play with my LifeDrive more. I miss that beast.
Also, Graffiti was the best on-screen ink implementation. Change my mind. :D
Fun fact: Palm's latest phone copies iWatch's user interface to a phone interface and makes it usable on a bigger device, it's both fun and awesome in so many levels if you ask me.
A shame the first Pre was just unusably slow. Innovator's curse, as usual.
I loved my Palm Pre 3 gotten off eBay (though I had to hack it to enable Serbian 3G connection, and I put together a Serbian Cyrillic keyboard layout too :): cards and swiping on the home button when editing text (to go left or right by a character or two) were monumental for me. Along with the full keyboard, the first (and last) time I didn't hate typing on a phone :D
Edit: it was probably 3G and not LTE at the time :)
It may have been... I can tell you that in current LG TVs usability is poor. I'm not sure about hack-ability in TVs, this may not apply
Android TV is always catching up with Android versions, for several times its future seemed to follow the same footsteps as Brillo, Android Things, ADK, Tango, Sphere, Daydream, Sceneform, wearOS,....
And then there is the whole update story which is even more catastrophic than on phones.
So if I had to buy a smart TV, at least one from the vendor that owns the OS.
Today, iOS and Android fundamentally use the same, inferior system with the app switcher being more like ctrl-alt-del on your windows machine (you can switch processes that way, but it’s not convenient).
The “revolution” of webOS is how it decided NOT to change everything. It worked just like OSX did.
Users tend to use the same half dozen programs constantly. They pin these to the dock. You’d open your app folder or start menu to see the rest. Same with webOS.
Once they’re open, the default is to switch between them either by clicking windows or using exposé. WebOS Home Screen was also the windows swapper rather than an afterthought visual task manager. WebOS even had card groups that came very close to OS X spaces or KDE Activities.
Your settings were a menu on the right. Just like OS X and you’re app menu was the upper left just like OS X.
If Steve Jobs had seen the webOS UI, I’m completely certain the iOS UI would never have existed.
The big issue that killed them was execution. The pre sucked. A phone without the physical keyboard would have done wonders at launch. Att our Verizon would have done wonders. Not having creepy ads would have sold units too.
On the software side, minor tweaks to Linux would reduce boot time from two minutes to 30 seconds (bigger tweaks could probably have gone even farther with only one piece of hardware). They apparently just didn’t have the experienced devs.
Likewise, at the point where the web was having its biggest growth spurt, they weren’t keeping up. They used a WebKit version and v8 version a year or two behind. Simply updating these two would have almost doubled performance while reducing memory problems.
Finally, they built the core UI on Qt, but didn’t make it available to developers. They had a great, cross platform kit that could have gotten a lot of companies on board, but they didn’t run with it.
I’d love for someone who was there at the time to explain what happened to cause so many simultaneous failures.
Wow I totally forgot about those creepy commercials. Those were really bad.
Regarding not making Qt available to developers on WebOS, that is still the way on LG TVs, store apps are only allowed to use the JS stack.