Open webOS up and running on the Nexus 7 | Hacker News Reader

Open webOS up and running on the Nexus 7

webosnation.com

63 pointsbarredo22 comments

I still enjoy using WebOS more than iOS. The card system is a joy to use. Palm created a great OS but handled hardware and marketing with almost criminal negligence. Hp did the same.

If I could get the top five apps in every category and decent hardware I would switch back to WebOS.

I agree on the marketing, but disagree strongly with your statement that they mishandled the hardware. I've got nearly a half-dozen WebOS devices kicking around (Pre 1-3, Pixi, Veer) that I would prefer to use over my Galaxy Nexus if they had Android on it. I would say that the hardware was actually the _best_ part of the WebOS ecosystem.

I will clarify that I liked the Pre but the hardware always came out 6 months too late.

The Touchpad was decent hardware but it was up against the iPad 2. The 16gig version was $499 yet the camera function didn't even work correctly when it was released! It should have been released at $399 at the most. Who at HP made this decision? Did they really think they could justify $499 for hardware that had fewer apps and 1 camera instead of 2 and was thicker than the iPad2?!

For what it's worth, there is an active community developing Android for HP Touchpad. The Touchpad had decent hardware to begin with and can be overclocked and more. I have a 32gb Touchpad running Jelly Bean and it's as smooth as butter, and the latest netflix app plays great, skype, etc all work fine in Android.

If you have a Touchpad check out the XDA Developers forum here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1247

[edited to add link]

Like many HPers I got a Touchpad in the fire sale and haven't converted it to Android yet because I heard the camera wasn't working. Apparently that's fixed now and Netflix works too? Might be time for me to convert.

Camera works in CM9 and CM10. I still use 9 because I'm not desperate for Android 4.1 (already have 4.2 on my Gnexus and Nexus 7).

The other place to look for Android on the Touchpad is rootzwiki (http://rootzwiki.com/forum/217-hp-touchpad/). Either forum will get you what you need most likely though, but I'm an admin on rootzwiki for what it's worth.

I grabbed a Touchpad in the sales. I only played around with it for a month or so but that was enough for the bezel to crack in places (a common occurrence I think). Certainly nowhere close to iPad-quality.

As for the internals... well, after that month I left mine gathering dust for a year whilst waiting for Android support to mature. I turned it back on to discover the touchscreen no longer worked. Someday I'll try and fix it, as it seems like it'd be a competent secondary Android tablet to leave around the house.

Yeah, I can't disagree with any of what you've said here. The TouchPad was one device in the Palm family I never picked up, since the writing was on the wall for WebOS then.

Me and four friends all got Pre 1s or Pixi Pluses, and every one of our phones broke the same way, the non-speakerphone microphone stopped working, so I had to make all my calls on speaker.

Before that the rubberized back came off all three of my colored back pieces for the Pixi.

The first couple of iterations weren't very good. The Pre3 otoh is pretty good.

iPad Mini hw >> Touchpad hw.

Now if I could have webOS and decent apps on iPad Mini hardware...

I feel exactly the same way. It's such a major disappointment that it wasn't more widely adopted, because WebOS is still to this day such a pleasure of an OS to use, and very intuitive feeling.

I bought the 32gig TouchPad during the firesale and i use it everyday with the following apps, email, calendar, Zite, twitter, reddit, quickoffice to access Google Drive and sometimes i transfer video tutorials onto it to watch later. I have really grown to like it but i will port it to android once it lags behind in software updates.

As someone who just compiled his own Android build and deployed on his tablet, there's something refreshing and enlightening about working with unlocked hardware and open-source software which you never get to experience on the iStack.

I'm not going to try open webOS but I can see why these people are doing what they do :)

Nice technological demo, but honestly I think that webOS is dead. Unless some major phone/tablet maker was to adopt it and put the marketing $$ behind to adopt it I don't see it going anywhere except as a technological demo. There was some good idea in webOS but Palm was never able to build any strong traction around it, and HP... We know what happen there.

Well, you probably shouldn't base your livelihood on consumer access to WebOS, but if that is the case then you should have changed business plans a while ago.

Does anyone else think that Mozilla should fork open WebOS?

Nice to see the most modern mobile OS (they did html and js apps way before anyone) still around. I might get a nexus 7 again to try this out.

I'm not sure I'd say that HTML+JS as a development platform is more or less "modern" than native code. It has strengths, and weaknesses, but isn't really a better or more refined method, just a different one.

Fair. On webOS iirc, HTML+JS is pretty much native, save for calls to the subsystem, not much unlike "native" code on other mobile platforms.

With my use of "modern" I mean, how HTML + JS apps/OS have become increasingly on the radar as a complete way of being.

  > they did html and js apps way before anyone

After iPhone was released the official way to make apps for it was HTML and JS. That was in 2007. WebOS was released in 2009.

I meant use of HTML and JS as the Mobile OS itself, and exclusively as the only way to make mobile apps. Firefox OS is doing something similar too.

Hope that clarifies.

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