“Calling themselves Phoenix International Communications – a name that references the mythical bird that emerged from the ashes of its predecessor – the group aims to raise enough money to produce and sell a smartphone running an open-source version of webOS perhaps by late 2013.” Like Jolla, I have the hope – just not the expectations.
This is amazing news… up until now webOS was the only one of the Linux-based alternative mobile OSes in development (the others being Firefox OS, Jolla Sailfish and Tizen) without any actual hardware announced. This changes that. Which is awesome. Especially considering that webOS is the only one of the four that actually has a mature UI stack that’s already proven to be awesome on real devices, I think it could have a real shot at a comeback, *if* it can just get the hardware support worked out.
I’m with Thom on this one. WebOS and Maemo are the two mobile operating systems that I love best and, although I really want to see them grow, I feel there is no future for them. A late 2013 timeframe to get to the point we were a few years ago seems flaky at best.
The only thing that _might_ save them, _if_ they can make the hardware, would be a compatibility layer that allowed Android applications to run unmodified. This, of couse, is doable, but requires a bit of an effort.
Another path would be to just follow another route and allow WebOS to be installed on current Android phones. Then the hardware part would not be a problem and they could “release early, release often”, using enthusiastic users’ current phones as testbeds. I don’t know why this approach is often ignored.
Lack of specs?
Several of the Android manufacturers are concerned that there is no real alternative to Android available to them… Given that WebOS and others are also Linux based it should be relatively easy to build devices which can run any of these platforms with minimal effort. One piece of hardware, one set of kernel and drivers, and several different userland stacks.
So what do you think of FirefoxOS and Tizen ?
They’ll both have products in the market early next year.
I’ll believe it when I can actually buy the products. Personally I think that Tizen is just hype and that FirefoxOS might be actually fun for a feature++ phone, but these are just my gut feelings without any factual basis.
How is Tizen hype ?
If I’m not mistaken Bada is actually pretty populair in Asia. Tizen is meant as it’s replacement.
And Tizen has an API-compatible layer for Bada or something along those lines. So you can easily port existing Bada applications.
So Tizen is also in the same feature++ phone corner as Firefox OS.
Edited 2012-12-11 22:38 UTC
Don’t they remember the trademark problems of Phoenix->Firebird->Firefox? (with Phoenix BIOS maker in this case)
At least Phoenix is a fitting name for anything WebOS related.
Zombie OS would be a much better fit. From a distance it looks promising and alive. But it is just a shuffling rotting body. And it just won’t stop moving.
Reminds me…
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=evilentity (AKA Undead Linux)
http://ubuntusatanic.org/news/about/
Quoted for truth. The most annoying consequence of various OS makers announcing that “our appstore has X thousand apps” is that it gives people (and pundits) the illusion good app ecosystems can be built easily. Unfortunately.. not.
Just look what it took for Android to get an app ecosystem that isn’t crap. Hence, any open source OS that isn’t entirely HTML5 based (aka Firefox OS) needs to have an Android compatibility layer. And since the thing is just a modified JVM and some C libraries (for native code produced by the NDK), what is taking them so long? My guess is that those alternative open source OSes want to have “their” ecosystem that is different from Android’s, aka they want to compete with Android instead of working with it, which is why those OSes don’t have many chances (unless they provide said Android compatibility layer, of course).
Edited 2012-12-11 11:29 UTC
Sailfish and BlackBerry 10 both include Android app support out of the box. BlackBerry requires the apps to be packaged, submitted and certified separately for the BB store, but IMHO that makes sense since otherwise there’s no ensuring that half the functionality won’t be broken due to missing OS hooks.