Submitted by Lukas Mathis touts many webOS features that he wants other vendors to steal. All this stuff just makes me more sad I never got to try webOS on anything because nobody gives a rat’s bum about The Netherlands. WebOS never came to market here. Especially its multitasking with cards looks so much more elegant than the horrible “multi”tasking implementations on Android and iOS. Hopeful note: Matias Duarte now heads the UX team for Android.
A few of these feature webOS shares with maemo.
Two excellent OSes screwed over by politics. Now I’m sad
Mer and derivatives are community projects now. Spark tablet is coming, now let’s wait for new handsets.
Intel stopped working with Nokia on Maemo.
So Intel and Samsung are now working together on Tizen on the Linux International flag.
Samsung seems to be working on a eventual replacement for Bada.
Samsung wasn’t happy with the performance of GTK and QT, they’ve already employed “Rasterman” of Enlightenment years ago.
So EFL is the base for the UI for Tizen. Certain code will come from Maemo.
The native applications are thus build around EFL, others will be HTML5-based.
Samsung will make it easy to make the Bada apps availabe on Tizen.
I’m one of those lucky guys that picked up the TouchPad for 99 bucks—actually picked up three and gave them to members of my family, who love it. While webOS has its pros and cons, it is, more often than not, simply a pleasure to work with. That said though, I’ll likely replace it with Android when the CyanogenMod ICS port is finished—webOS is just too slow overall, and the app pickings are too slim, but I will miss it when it’s gone.
Don’t wait for Android to be “finished” – just install CM9 (alpha2) now
Trust me!
http://rootzwiki.com/forum/278-cyanogenmod/
The dual-boot is pretty handy, so you’ll still get your WebOS pleasure when you need it.
Anyhow, I do enjoy WebOS – I just wish it had a better browser, and better app support.
I second that! I’m typing this from my Touchpad running CM9. It is so much faster. I installed it this weekend, and haven’t needed to boot back into WebOS.
Don’t get me wrong, I love WebOS and it will always have a place in my heart. I carried the original Pre for two years, and would have stood in line to get a Pre3 if they didn’t kill it off. I reluctantly switched to Android because the Pre just became too slow.
The only thing I miss from WebOS is the wave bar. I have an Android app that duplicates its functionality on my Gingerbread phone, by it doesn’t seem to work on ICS. I’m hoping the developer gets it working soon.
The best part is that all the Apps from my phone automatically download to the tablet. Some of them gained new features that must only be available on a tablet.
My friend has a touchpad running cm7 and it looks pretty slow to me. Then again I am comparing it to a galaxy s2.
I used the original Palm Pre for over two years before the hardware started wearing out and I switched to an iphone 4s. While I love the speed and build quality of the iphone, I still miss the elegant, intuitive nature of webOS. It was(and is) way ahead of iOS as far as a consistent, natural interface. There is something just fun about it.
I still use webOS daily on my Touchpad but it was better as a phone OS. All operations are consistent across apps and can be done just using the thumb while holding the phone. Perfect.
I still wish I had a touchpad. It all looks very clean and well done. The UI looks so much more functional and pleasant than metro for tablets and even for desktops. It looks like they have outdone apple too. Such a shame HP killed the tablet. I would hope that someone would take webos and run with it on new hardware but considering HP failed to offload it I’m not sure anyone is around to breath new life into it.
“because nobody gives a rat’s bum about The Netherlands.”
For once I do agree with you Thom.
Having been one of the “suckers” who purchased a webOS phone… you have not missed anything. While the OS was in general a decent implementation realized on shit HW, it was nothing to write home about. I much prefer the iOS features/interface.
nope,
french pre3 owner here. I’ve bought it for 180e Touchstone included (so thom, why you didn’t import it from here?) i’ve heard terrible story about broken pre and pre2, but my pre3 is very well made!!!
ps: i’ve buy it to replace my broken n900. And even if the multitasking is good on palm, it’s not in par with maemo. Soon, my pre3 will retired, i’ve received my n9
(feeling like an amiga owner in pc world)
ps:sent with my pre3
))
Edited 2012-02-23 07:26 UTC
1 thing I disagree with the article on is the accounts. While that’s great for a phone or other personal device, my TouchPad is a communal device (between myself and my girlfriend). Having centralised accounts makes things like e-mail and facebook a lot harder to manage in app.
Edited 2012-02-23 09:40 UTC
I agree to some extent… I ended up getting my wife her own Touchpad, but she still ends up using mine quite often.
The other thing that drives me nuts about Mobile OSes is their assumption that they will remember your credentials.
I want my touchpad to prompt me every time it logs into my gmail – with an option to “remember for 30 mins” or something… why can’t we have more of that?
maemo, webos and, for extend, winphone7 are PERSONNAL product. what you want is MULTIUSER product. as the day of today, on mobile space, that doesn’t exist.
BUT, if you use a more linuxish os, you could have a multi user environment.
No, what I want is a secure OS.
Are you trying to tell me that the web browser on these devices is multi-user?
The web browser is nice enough to give me the option of saving passwords or not – why can’t the rest of the os?
As for multi-profile (which is different from multi-user) it seems CM9 will have support for that since there appears to be a non-functional profile manager. Is that really too much to ask for whenit comes to storing credentials? Can’t we employ some kind of key ring interface where I can hand my tablet to a friend without worrying about the, accessing all my privileged accounts?
Did we leave the modern era where security is increasingly important?
Edited 2012-02-24 02:37 UTC
Thom, if you like the card interface for multitasking you should check out the N9.
I hear the BB Playbook has similar and very good multi tasking. I wonder if it will distributed to us smaller countries.
The card interface has been recreated on iOS. Check out CardSwitcher. Don’t know what’s available similar on Android, but it works on iOS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6kzgN1xddA
I just replaced my Pre last week with a Nexus S, webOS is still best mobile OS in my opinion, and if the Pre’s hardware didn’t suck I would still be using it.