
Can HP’s webOS Rise from the Ashes? - rdahbura
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508251/can-hps-webos-rise-from-the-ashes/
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cletus
This is one of those times when the answer is simply "no" (before anyone
mentions that stupid "law" like it's the first time anyone has seen it).

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.

~~~
mortenjorck
For smartphones: Definitely too late.

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.

~~~
clarky07
I disagree. I think the tablet market is such that it is tied to the phone
ecosystem and vice versa. If you can't compete in one, you can't compete in
the other. Microsoft _might_ be able to compete with the tie to it's desktop
(instead of/in addition to the phone). webOS has no mobile or desktop tie in
so it has no chance.

~~~
mortenjorck
That's definitely the Apple model, and it applies so long as the tablet market
is the iPad market.

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.

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Osiris
On my HP Touchpad I prefer WebOS over Android. The reason I use Android is the
quality of the apps, not the OS.

* 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.

~~~
jonhohle
But what niche does that fill that iOS doesn't?

> * 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).

~~~
pessimizer
>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.

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.

~~~
niels_olson
> the iOS UI and the Android UI are clunky and terrible

TouchPad owner here. The card deck of WebOS was really nice. I miss nothing
else about it.

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programminggeek
I don't think webOS is going to get a second chance for similar reasons that
BeOS never got a second chance. Even if it has a lot of great ideas, apps,
whatever, the groups who should be interested in webOS are using Android.

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.

~~~
beagle3
> It seems like webOS, Meego, bada, and all these other OS's are going to end
> up in the footnotes of the smartphone revolution

If bada is on that list, so should Windows Phone be:

[http://www.neowin.net/news/ouch-bada-os-market-share-
larger-...](http://www.neowin.net/news/ouch-bada-os-market-share-larger-than-
windows-phone)

------
grayrest
The answer is no. It's kind of sad since WebOS had by far the most awesome OSS
community. As a dedicated frontend developer, I'm rooting for a phone
ecosystem using the browser stack for apps but B2G is my current hope and I
don't give it great odds for success. I'll probably use/make apps for it but
it's a tough sell for others.

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streptomycin
_There is some precedent for left-for-dead tech being brought back to life:
the Firefox Web browser, now one of the top browsers, was built from the open-
source version of Netscape Communicator, which battled with Microsoft’s
Internet Explorer in the late 1990s and early 2000s._

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.

------
jonhohle
As the owner of an HP TouchPad, I could never figure out what people found so
appealing about WebOS - it was slow, not really that polished (more than
Android, significantly less than iOS), unintuitive (menus hiding actions in
many apps), and had a terrible on-screen keyboard. Cards made me feel like I
had manage apps in a way that iOS and Android don't. The hardware was heavy
and bulky. The only way to make the device reasonably usable was to spend a
significant amount of time installing hacks to bump the CPU speed, turn off
logging, and a host of other things that end users shouldn't have to deal with
for a device of this type.

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).

~~~
clauretano
On phones, webOS was pretty slow and not all that smooth, until the Pre 2 came
into existence with about twice the processing power and webOS 2.
Unfortunately, webOS was already floundering at this point and Verizon was the
only U.S. carrier to launch the Pre 2, so very few people ever got to
experience it. There was the HP Veer on AT&T as well, but that was quite the
niche offering.

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.

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mark-r
The example of Firefox doesn't really apply here. It succeeded because
Microsoft dropped the ball and there weren't many viable alternatives. Does
anybody think Apple and Google will make the same mistake?

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cpeterso
webOS development continues at Gram, an HP spin off developing webOS TVs with
LG. As a Treo fan and ex-Palm employee, I wish Palm and webOS would be allowed
to rest in peace. :\

<http://www.webosnation.com/gram-working-lg-open-webos-tv>

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Nux
No.

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onedev
Surprised someone hasn't posted Betteridge's law yet.

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jlkinsel
I'm not sure what I need less - another programming language (elm) or another
mobile platform...

~~~
IheartApplesDix
Speak for yourself

~~~
frozenport
I think he did?

