Can HP’s webOS Rise from the Ashes?
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
The most you could do I think is skin Android to look and act like WebOS.
There is significant technical work in getting it to work on hardware. It's simply not going to go anywhere until you can get manufacturer and/or carrier buy-in and what's the upside of this over, say, Android or even Windows Phone 8?
Google, Apple and Microsoft can put, have put and are putting significant cloud infrastructure behind their mobile OSs. That's not something easily replicated with another OS and I have little faith that HP can deliver equivalent infrastructure.
The fact of the matter is that WebOS failed on Palm. HP screwed up whatever chance they had by some corporate schism showing that they just weren't that interested (particularly once Hurd was ousted).
I remember seeing the same thing after BeOS failed. Let it go. It's over.
For tablets: Maybe not too late.
It's over in handhelds, a duopoly between iOS and Android, with a niche duopoly between RIM and Windows Phone. Tablets are going to get much more interesting, though, with balkanized ecosystems forming around Android offshoots such as Amazon's Kindle, and the fallout from Microsoft's surprisingly desperate move of trying to front-load its tablet OS into its flagship desktop OS.
The difference between tablets and desktops is going to get blurrier in what we accomplish with them, but perhaps not in how we accomplish it. There's room for a dark horse here.
That will continue to be the case for awhile, but the tablet's conceptual proximity to the desktop (even apart from its forced convergence by Microsoft) is going to make its evolution more complicated than the smartphone market has been with its proximity to the younger, less baggage-heavy mobile / PDA market.
Smartphones are reaching the slow part of an S-curve right now. Tablets are just getting started.
* Cards - Application switching is fast and easy. While in card view you can see the current state of running applications. Card stacking is pretty cool too.
* Clean UI - The WebOS UI is very clean an uncluttered. I find it pleasing to look at and it's easy to use.
* System-wide Mute - When I go to a meeting or other environment I need a full system-wide mute. On Android I'll turn down the sound only to have an annoying notification sound go off in a meeting because notification volume is still at 100%.
* "Home button" - switches to card view and shows the application launcher. This means that a single button works for 1) closing apps, 2) switching apps, 3) launching apps.
So in short, I hope WebOS does make a comeback, though they may want to look into adding some type of Android compatibility layer to make it easy to port apps over as that's the biggest downfall of the platform.
> * Clean UI - The WebOS UI is very clean an uncluttered. I find it pleasing to look at and it's easy to use.
The WebOS UI is clean compared to Android, but years behind iOS. I was excited to try WebOS when I got a discounted TouchPad last year, but really disliked how unpolished the entire thing felt. Text selection was abysmal. Actions were often hidden in menus. Animation was not smooth or coherent. Cards is a cool concept, but I don't think it improves usability significantly (at least not significantly more than four-finger swipe).
> * System-wide Mute - When I go to a meeting or other environment I need a full system-wide mute. On Android I'll turn down the sound only to have an annoying notification sound go off in a meeting because notification volume is still at 100%.
Again, not an issue on iOS. Couldn't this be fixed with an app in Android (honest question, people always talk bout everything being replaceable in Android).
> * "Home button" - switches to card view and shows the application launcher. This means that a single button works for 1) closing apps, 2) switching apps, 3) launching apps.
This is largely the same in iOS, but the priorities are different - 1 click to launch new apps, two clicks to switch/close apps.
I put CM9 on my TouchPad because development was stagnating on the TouchPad and I was really surprised how B-grade the entire experience is - even compared to WebOS. An iPad is fast, consistent, clean, and works out of the box. Besides cost, I really don't see what people like about _using_ WebOS or Android over iOS (philosophically I understand, pragmatically, I just can't get there).
The two Android phones I have I got free with my cell service, I have a B&N Nook ($200) that I put Android on, and an HP Touchpad ($150) with Android.
Mute - I found Android apps that offer it but it would be better if it was built into the OS. On iOS isn't the mute switch on the device a ringer mute, not a full system mute?
I have been tempted in the past to get an iPad but couldn't justify the price when I could get a full Windows laptop for the same price. All I'm saying is that for us lowly poor people, price is a factor especially for a "want" and not a "need".
I think the WebOS UI blows iOS away - the only problem with the WebOS UI is that it was buggy and unfinished. Both the iOS UI and the Android UI are clunky and terrible in design IMO, but they have had a lot more work put into them (and in the case of iOS, hardware tuning), so they're going to be a lot smoother and account for a lot more minority or uncommon use cases, and to have discovered more workflow speedbumps.
I think the UI design of WebOS and Maemo/Meego are head and shoulders above the incumbents, but that a lot of extra-technical issues sank both OSes. You can't really stumble as bad as HP/Nokia did in such a tight duopoly and expect to survive.
TouchPad owner here. The card deck of WebOS was really nice. I miss nothing else about it.
I don't understand your problem. On tablets like the Nexus 7 the volume slider is global and muting will mute the device completely. On a phone turning down the ringer volume to vibrate/mute will stop all notification sounds. Only the media volume of the music player and games and whatever is separate.
Look at China, there are some mobile phone companies in China that could take webOS and make it really awesome and sell to millions of customers, but they are busy building Android phones and are working on building Tizen. Mozilla could have taken webOS and built on that, but instead they are doing their own OS.
HP itself doesn't even seem to care about webOS, so it's hard to convince anyone else to do so either. It seems like webOS, Meego, bada, and all these other OS's are going to end up in the footnotes of the smartphone revolution similar to the many desktop PC os's that never quite took off.
If bada is on that list, so should Windows Phone be:
http://www.neowin.net/news/ouch-bada-os-market-share-larger-...
sadly, the experience of using it (on my n900) was plagued by the same problems that linux had in the early days, where the hardware and software randomly decided not to get on with each other (specifically, in my case, phone calls that would drop before the phone app swapped in, and a gps that took anywhere from 20 minutes to never to get a lock). i cannot help but think that if only nokia had thrown their full weight behind it, the second or third generation phone would have been truly stunning.
If there was another open source web browser already leading the market in the late 90s, then Firefox probably never would have happened.
Anyway, kudos to these hackers and I wish them luck. WebOS is great.
Maybe the experience was better on phones. The only thing redeeming about the TouchPad was it's great screen for the time and price ($99 for 1024x768 10" IPS display).
Despite webOS being around for two years before the launch of the HP TouchPad, the device was less refined because so much of webOS 3 was new. It was the first webOS device without a hardware keyboard, for instance. It was also the first without a gesture area, the first with that new notification system, etc.