Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

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> Nokia had a chance for greatness around 2010 with Maemo and Meego. And either by stupidity or malice they ruined that. It was the right moment to have a chance, the smartphone game was still starting up, Nokia was still very influential in that arena, and the 2 devices it made (the N900 and N9) were great in their own way, for what was around that time.

Meego, Maemo was really early experimentation IMHO. WebOS and Tizen were two worthy contenders, but both of them went to die in enterprise institutions that have no understanding how to create a product. HP absolutely smashed WebOS, and Samsung in its usual ultra hostile fashion destroyed any open source potential Tizen had. HP, Samsung, and Oracle is where Open Source goes to die.

WebOS was absolutely amazing. The Palm Pre on the other hand felt like plastic trash. I was young enough when it came out that I was dependent on my parents to buy and pay for my phone still and I dragged my dad to a Sprint store at 5:00am to make sure we were first in line to get one so they didn't sell out. When we got there I figured I must have the wrong date because we were the entire line.

I used that Pre until the plastic shell started falling apart and by then the writing was on the wall that it wasn't going to be the next big thing for phones and I regretfully bought my first Android phone with my own hard earned money.

There was also Bada OS, Samsung's attempt to cut the dependency on Android. I was actually running a device with 1.0, and it was surprisingly usable. The investment in building a development community was also there. They released lots of documentation and the SDK. Sadly, they followed with a 2.0 that really wanted to feel like Android (but wasn't).

They obviously didn't want to put all their eggs into one basket and kept releasing Android phones in parallel. Eventually, Bada died a silent death, although some of it probably found its way to Tizen.

Palm/HP WebOS descendant lives as open-source based on OpenEmbedded, shipped on LG TVs.

https://www.webosose.org/

And much saner than using Android based TVs.

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