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Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

WebOS was the intersection of Android's hack-ability and iOS's usability (in fact, I would say that when it came to user customization it far surpassed Android with Preware)

We'd all be much better off today if they hadn't had made those fatal errors

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Actually iOS is an evolution of PalmOS/WebOS user interface paradigm. iOS would have a much harder time to win usability awards if Palm was still around.

WebOS introduced the concept of cards for multitasking, and that you could swipe a card away to close the app. This is exactly his iOS implements multitasking today.

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.

Also the initial home screen paradigm is completely same as PalmOS, sans the categories.

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.

I can't remember exactly in what order UX concepts of Maemo/WebOS/Meego came in, but they all had the concept of cards, implemented slightly differently (eg. Nokia N9 and Pre 3 were both released-into-void in 2011 :)). It's amazing that such great products basically never got released (Nokia just sold-off the mobile division to Microsoft, and Pre 3, with Palm already owned by HP, was scrapped days before release).

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 :)

Apple also took about a decade to clone Palm's induction charger with magnetic alignment gadget.

A shame the first Pre was just unusably slow. Innovator's curse, as usual.

That was their own fault. No ndk when Qt literally shipped on the device. In addition, the QtWebkit and v8 versions were woefully out of date being slower and using more memory than necessary. They also seemingly didn’t optimize their Linux kernel or boot sequence either.

I think some of the problems could be traced to performance and power profile of TI OMAP. It was underclocked AFAIK. Probably due to too much heat or power or both.

It was a widespread delusion. The original iphone didn't support native third party apps until iOS 2. For whatever reason, a bunch of people thought that web-only was the future for mobile.

Nokia had flip over to silence thing in Sirocco/Vertu phones for long time

Going back even further, landline phones had a mechanical design that worked the same way, where you put down the phone part you held into the phone-part that was connected to the line ("screen down" into it) and the call would hang up.

iOS still turns cards view into a visual task killer instead of making it front and center. They also don’t have the powerful and useful card groups.

> WebOS was the intersection of Android's hack-ability and iOS's usability

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

lg web os is a nightmare, i wish i had read up on it before i bought the last lg tv. laggy and missing so many apps. ended up buying a cheap android streaming box as the webos is cluttered with so much crap I won't use but missing things I use on other tvs

I explicitly bought a LG TV with Web OS, because having some Android dev experience I don't want to put myself to Android TV.

can I ask what put you off it? I mainly go with android for the apps and sideloading I can't sideload on the LG webos tv I have but can on all three android tvs. media streaming apps on LG webos feel very poorly optimised with the amount of "restarting to recover memory" I get watching youtube/amazon/netflix/stan/etc. even after cleaning cache/reinstalling/resetting/factory resetting the device it happens within 48 hours. most of the useful apps i have on the android tvs are not ported and if they are considering it they seem to be so far down the list of priorities for the devs, they may as well say no. PS, i don't have any love for android and if i am using webos wrong or missing something obvious i would love to know

For me Android is just another OS, I don't really care for its FOSS roots.

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.

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