It's Time For HP To Throw The Long Bomb And License WebOS | Hacker News Reader

It's Time For HP To Throw The Long Bomb And License WebOS

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25 pointsHapper27 comments

What HP needs to do is to get a 3.7" mobile phone and a 7" tablet out on the market.

As part of there development program, HP sent me a Pre 2, which I used for ten days before switching back to my iPhone 4. The OS was great to use and there are plenty of apps out there in the App Catalog, and even more apps and tweaks in the homebrew catalog, but the main thing that took me back to the iPhone was the screen size (3.1" on the Pre 1 and 2, the Veer and Pixi are 2.6"). I just couldn't get enough information on the screen at once, and scrolling and pinching got annoying quickly.

There's a glut of 10" tablets on the market. The iPad dominates the market and the ten or so 10" Android tablets do nothing to help HP's situation there. 7" tablets are completely different when it comes to portability, there isn't as much competition at this screen size, and Apple has stated that they have no intentions to build a 7" tablet (which means that it's coming, but it's not here yet and doesn't have 80-95% market share like the 10" iPad does). A $250-$300 7" tablet has the opportunity to give HP a nice foothold into the market, and once they do, they can go back and fight for 2nd place in the 10" market. Building 7" marketshare and building consumer mindshare to eliminate also-ran status is the only way HP (or anyone else for that matter) will have a fighting chance in the tablet space.

If HP are to licence webOS there is only one company out there they should think of licensing it to and no other.

answer : HTC

HTC has all the things webOS needs.

1. A strong dev community, just take a look at xda-developers.com. Devs have been hacking HTC devices since the dawn of time, even back when they only made OEM handsets. The community is dedicated and goes along with changes that HTC make. the phone I am using now is a HTC hd2 nearly two years old it came running Windows mobile 6.5, shortly after the HTC community hacked it to run android off the desire, then they got it running ubuntu ( and modified it to work with touchscreens ), then Windows phone 7, then started working on meego. You can get any virtually any version of Android on this phone even none HTC roms, like the dell streak. If HTC take on webOS you can be sure there will be a version cooked up for every current HTC device by the community. If that isn't the Dev community webOS needs then I don't know what is.

2. they build great hardware and have a reputation for quality.

3. they have a higher aspiration for innovation around the brand than samsung and seem more willing to try new things.

4. they like to focus on user experience and do a pretty good job of it. I would not go for any flavour of Android that is not running the sense ui, a lot of effort has been put into it and it beats the stock Android interface every other manufacturer churns out.

I can't see how HP can do it on there own, but I can't see how they could do it with generic licensing either. They need one and only one strong manufacturer in the mobile space to propell webOS, and I'm sorry but I can't see a better fit than HTC.

of course I'm sure HTC would have something to say on the matter.

Why not Samsung... Didn't Apotheker say something to the effect that they had already discussed it with them?

Sorry, this is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

We've already seen how having a integrated hw + sw solution combined with execution has lead to success for Apple.

Palm has the sw + hw piece (for the most part), they just really need to execute well which they have not done to date.

Licensing the OS is just going to add fragmentation as well as delay the release process as now they would have to synchronize with carriers as well as phone manufacturers.

I think WebOS would benefit from a wider installed base, especially in mobile phones. HP/Palm has a limited amount of phones that they can seem to get out there - for instance, the Palm Pre 3 was announced in February, but it's still not out yet. Even when it comes out, I doubt it will be on all of the major US carriers.

Why not license to HTC or Samsung - as WebOS runs on Linux, it may not be that much trouble to take a device designed for Android to get it to run WebOS - anyone know?

Developing for WebOS is pretty easy - it's all done in Enyo, a slick component-driven Javascript framework. You don't end up writing much HTML or CSS, and you can do much of your testing with Safari or Chrome on your desktop. You're not tied to an IDE. Also there's no code signing/provisioning issues like there are with iOS.

Android uses a slightly modified Linux kernel; porting wouldn't be a quick find/replace but it'd still be easier than a totally different OS. If HP wanted to make things even easier, they could likely do some sort of WebOS/Android hybrid (Android's modified kernel with the WebOS userland) so OEMs wouldn't even need to figure out the Android/WebOS low-level differences.

How exactly is this different from using Android?

As long as HP makes WebOS enabled devices, wouldn't you end up with the same potential conflicts that you would have had with Google in the first place?

webOS does not have the Java/Dalvik baggage.

Yes! If WebOS was way better than the alternatives, it might give HP an advantage to be the only provider. However, it's not perceived as better, and the main complaint is a lack of apps. And that is because of a lack of popularity. That could be overcome if HP's hardware was much better than their competitors, but it's just not.

WebOS pulls down hardware sales, and the hardware isn't doing anything to bolster WebOS. The best shot at saving WebOS is to license it.

I disagree.

Unless HP was very picky about who they license too, we'll end up with another Android scenario, and a race to the bottom with hardware vendors doing as little as humanly possible to make a good experience. To them, it's just a free/cheap way of saving R&D costs.

Having said that, hardware companies already have that option in Android, so HP could take the high road and enforce strict standards for usability, compatibility, upgrades, etc. on licensees.

I still think it's a very risky gamble. HP hasn't demonstrated that they know how to create a winning end to end product with it yet. How would giving out part of that recipe (with restrictions) help anyone else be successful with it?

"the hardware isn't doing anything to bolster WebOS"

So... improve the hardware. If HP as one of the largest companies in the world (deep pockets) can't make a good piece of hardware for webOS, who else is going to be able to?

Licensing webOS will just lead to a lot of fingerpointing between HP and other vendors as people have bad experiences. "It's the hardware!" "No, it's the software!" HP owns all ends of the process. If they can't make it good, it's time to retire it (and I say this as someone who wants webOS to succeed - I just don't think licensing it out is going to save it).

I'll make an assertion about this: HP cannot make a winning end to end product with it.

They should license it to people who can. They're too big and too out of touch. They can provide some other valuable things, it's a well funded heavyweight alternative to android but I don't see HP building the next killer tablet or phone and as a consumer, I just don't think that when I see that sort of stuff from a company like IBM or HP.

HP needs to open source WebOS. Make it the best touchscreen interface for Linux and build a community around it.

They don't really have any other options. They have low single-digit market share. There's not much money to be made selling a proprietary OS for $5-15 a copy. There is no way they can match the massive developer communities around Google/Apple/MS.

Here are the open source parts of webOS: http://opensource.palm.com/3.0.2/index.html

At least some webOS games run on Maemo with this stuff... http://gitorious.org/preenv http://wiki.maemo.org/Preenv

Nokia tried that with "the best open source community money can buy" and failed in the end, what makes you think HP will succeed? You cannot increase market share with hardware that only "community" and geeks buy...

I think licensing WebOS will dilute it and I don't see it being successful. The problem for WebOS, as I see it, is lack of apps; especially for tablets.

But it has more tablet-capable apps than android. ~300 at last count.

That is a real good point. I wonder why there are so few.

What IS webOS? Under the hood, I mean. I know it uses a Linux kernel, but past that, all I've really heard is about the only option for applications being HTML/JavaScript. My somewhat subconscious impression to date has been that it's really just WebKit with some nice "web"apps and extra hardware integration.

If that's the case, I don't really understand what either HP or anyone else would get out of it being licensed to other manufacturers.

webOS is a fully fledged mobile OS. Yeah Linux Kernel. The way you write apps and lay them out is very similar to HTML/Javascript, and the rendering engine is a modified version of webkit. However, it supports native applications too.

So what does that make webOS? If I take the Linux kernel, and put webkit on top, in what way would it be different to webOS?

Launcher, notification manager, settings manager, appstore, developer kit, consistent theming and widgets, etc etc etc.

You know, all that stuff that Linux users have a hard time caring about but really appeal to regular people and devs.

None of this really seems to clear up my confusion.

I guess my question is closer to, how is webOS hard to duplicate? How is it special?

As someone who's never actually had a webOS device, I've been given little reason to think about them, so I might just be missing how polished it is or something. This still points to a major marketing problem, though. HP hasn't told the world why it should care about webOS.

"how is webOS hard to duplicate? How is it special?"

Couldn't you say that about any OS that's based on open source software? WebOS's big differentiator is things like UI, which are difficult to duplicate well.

Let's put it this way, ChromeOS is a lot like webOS except in a much larger form factor.

That would still leave you with a) Writing shims so that you can expose things like cameras, gps etc via api hooks b) Write a consistent UI story so that people are not writing raw html/css c) Come up with a good native app strategy for the cases where performance matters

At the root of it most problems drill down to basic engineering - lots and lots of it.

When WebOS and the Pre first launched it was indeed just HTML/Javascript applications (not entirely unlike the first iPhone which ran apps on the safari engine) Later Palm released a more capable dev kit that could do native code.

"The Plug-In Development Kit (PDK) is a component of the HP webOS SDK that lets developers use C and C++ alongside the web technologies that power the SDK, and even mix them seamlessly within a single application." -- https://developer.palm.com/content/api/dev-guide/pdk/overvie...

Native apps in webOS are written in node.js:

https://developer.palm.com/content/resources/intro_to_hp_web...

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