I still remember my Palm Pre and the first version of WebOS. I sometimes wonder how much different the phone OS world would look like if Palm didn't choose Spring as their exclusive partner and commit their other fatal mistakes.
Palm's history is a convoluted mess. I use them as a case study when teaching my creativity course. I made an annotated diagram of their rise and fall to show my students...
I feel HP TouchPad could have deserved the final point, being the last webOS device from the Palm lineage, and also gaining bit of a cult following after the firesale. It would make interesting case study in itself.
> On August 18, 2011, 49 days after the TouchPad was launched in the United States, HP announced that it would discontinue all current devices running webOS. Remaining TouchPad stock received substantial price reductions, and quickly sold out
As the article mistakes... Web OS was the classic example of a skunk works project. A very small amount of people working in near isolation, and answerable only to senior managers.
To any company in trouble, and in need of innovation, this is the perfect strategy. Inevitable Wikipedia link...
Yes I remember this. If I ever taught the course again I would add it. Perhaps also correct the typos :)
Jeffrey Hawkins, the inventor of the palm, has a bit of a cult following almost designers. Far more respected that Johny ‘Dieter Rams’ Ives. His prototyping process was unique. (Now widely copied). Check out his wooden (!) Palm prototypes...
I think the rot set in the moment they partners with larger companies in order to make their products. Nowadays, with Kickstarter and cheap Chinese manufacturing, they could have gone it alone, and not have had to compromise on their vision.
WebOS was the intersection of Android's hack-ability and iOS's usability (in fact, I would say that when it came to user customization it far surpassed Android with Preware)
We'd all be much better off today if they hadn't had made those fatal errors
Actually iOS is an evolution of PalmOS/WebOS user interface paradigm. iOS would have a much harder time to win usability awards if Palm was still around.
WebOS introduced the concept of cards for multitasking, and that you could swipe a card away to close the app. This is exactly his iOS implements multitasking today.
I also remember the really natural way that Palm let you ignore an phone call by placing the phone face down to silence a call you didn’t want to pick up.
Also the initial home screen paradigm is completely same as PalmOS, sans the categories.
Heck, even the notification screen and widgets screen is an evolution of the Today.prc from PalmOS days.
I need to play with my LifeDrive more. I miss that beast.
Also, Graffiti was the best on-screen ink implementation. Change my mind. :D
Fun fact: Palm's latest phone copies iWatch's user interface to a phone interface and makes it usable on a bigger device, it's both fun and awesome in so many levels if you ask me.
I can't remember exactly in what order UX concepts of Maemo/WebOS/Meego came in, but they all had the concept of cards, implemented slightly differently (eg. Nokia N9 and Pre 3 were both released-into-void in 2011 :)). It's amazing that such great products basically never got released (Nokia just sold-off the mobile division to Microsoft, and Pre 3, with Palm already owned by HP, was scrapped days before release).
I loved my Palm Pre 3 gotten off eBay (though I had to hack it to enable Serbian 3G connection, and I put together a Serbian Cyrillic keyboard layout too :): cards and swiping on the home button when editing text (to go left or right by a character or two) were monumental for me. Along with the full keyboard, the first (and last) time I didn't hate typing on a phone :D
Edit: it was probably 3G and not LTE at the time :)
That was their own fault. No ndk when Qt literally shipped on the device. In addition, the QtWebkit and v8 versions were woefully out of date being slower and using more memory than necessary. They also seemingly didn’t optimize their Linux kernel or boot sequence either.
I think some of the problems could be traced to performance and power profile of TI OMAP. It was underclocked AFAIK. Probably due to too much heat or power or both.
It was a widespread delusion. The original iphone didn't support native third party apps until iOS 2. For whatever reason, a bunch of people thought that web-only was the future for mobile.
Going back even further, landline phones had a mechanical design that worked the same way, where you put down the phone part you held into the phone-part that was connected to the line ("screen down" into it) and the call would hang up.
lg web os is a nightmare, i wish i had read up on it before i bought the last lg tv. laggy and missing so many apps. ended up buying a cheap android streaming box as the webos is cluttered with so much crap I won't use but missing things I use on other tvs
can I ask what put you off it?
I mainly go with android for the apps and sideloading
I can't sideload on the LG webos tv I have but can on all three android tvs. media streaming apps on LG webos feel very poorly optimised with the amount of "restarting to recover memory" I get watching youtube/amazon/netflix/stan/etc. even after cleaning cache/reinstalling/resetting/factory resetting the device it happens within 48 hours.
most of the useful apps i have on the android tvs are not ported and if they are considering it they seem to be so far down the list of priorities for the devs, they may as well say no.
PS, i don't have any love for android and if i am using webos wrong or missing something obvious i would love to know
For me Android is just another OS, I don't really care for its FOSS roots.
Android TV is always catching up with Android versions, for several times its future seemed to follow the same footsteps as Brillo, Android Things, ADK, Tango, Sphere, Daydream, Sceneform, wearOS,....
And then there is the whole update story which is even more catastrophic than on phones.
So if I had to buy a smart TV, at least one from the vendor that owns the OS.
Someone at Nokia once said iOS is like a house with all the doors facing outside. You have to go outside to get from your bed to the bathroom or kitchen or wherever else.
Today, iOS and Android fundamentally use the same, inferior system with the app switcher being more like ctrl-alt-del on your windows machine (you can switch processes that way, but it’s not convenient).
The “revolution” of webOS is how it decided NOT to change everything. It worked just like OSX did.
Users tend to use the same half dozen programs constantly. They pin these to the dock. You’d open your app folder or start menu to see the rest. Same with webOS.
Once they’re open, the default is to switch between them either by clicking windows or using exposé. WebOS Home Screen was also the windows swapper rather than an afterthought visual task manager. WebOS even had card groups that came very close to OS X spaces or KDE Activities.
Your settings were a menu on the right. Just like OS X and you’re app menu was the upper left just like OS X.
If Steve Jobs had seen the webOS UI, I’m completely certain the iOS UI would never have existed.
The big issue that killed them was execution. The pre sucked. A phone without the physical keyboard would have done wonders at launch. Att our Verizon would have done wonders. Not having creepy ads would have sold units too.
On the software side, minor tweaks to Linux would reduce boot time from two minutes to 30 seconds (bigger tweaks could probably have gone even farther with only one piece of hardware). They apparently just didn’t have the experienced devs.
Likewise, at the point where the web was having its biggest growth spurt, they weren’t keeping up. They used a WebKit version and v8 version a year or two behind. Simply updating these two would have almost doubled performance while reducing memory problems.
Finally, they built the core UI on Qt, but didn’t make it available to developers. They had a great, cross platform kit that could have gotten a lot of companies on board, but they didn’t run with it.
I’d love for someone who was there at the time to explain what happened to cause so many simultaneous failures.
