This is the time when webOS really could shine. Web standards now have things like wasm or webworkers that make apps much more powerful. Today, loads of phones have more than enough memory.
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There were also rough edges in the UI, but nothing worse than iOS or Android at the time. The hardware was sub-par and memory was too restricted at the time. The underlying Linux OS never had even basic optimizations put in place. They use Qt's version of v8 and webkit which were terribly out of date and (as a result) much slower than they should have been. They used Qt for the GUI, but didn't allow native apps to be built using it (and didn't have a native SDK until way after they should have). The flaws of webOS were blatant and fairly fixable. This was in the backbone, knockout, early angular days.
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You could compare it to React with manual view updating (which is actually more powerful if less easy on the developer). EnyoJS was/is a component-based framework. Having all your different accounts working together in one central place seamlessly is an experience nothing comes close to.Įven comparing to the web they were ahead. Both have decided that users who are perfectly capable of using a menu on their desktop are incapable of doing so on a phone.Īnother not really mimicked feature of webOS was its service integration. Home is default with app switching being someplace you go to to see your list of 100 "open" apps. Once again comparing to OSX, webOS has a consistent menu in the upper-left and a settings menu in the upper-right.Īndroid and iOS now try to mimic this, but it's always a secondary feature. You go from group to group and managing apps is the default. Compare groups of cards to OSX horizontal spaces. Aside from that, managing apps is front-and-center.
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A dock of favorites with an app drawer plus JustType to find less-used apps. The default paradigm in webOS is the same. Once you have everything open, switching and managing applications is the name of the game with lots of tools to make this happen. After that, you either open your start menu or launchpad and go hunting else you Cmd-SPC and type the name. You have a few favorites in your dock for quick access. Both have taken step after step to deal with the effects without really addressing the cause. Someone (at Nokia IIRC) once compared iOS navigation to having a house where every door faced outside and you have to go outside to go around to the room you want. The UI was successful (IMO) because it wasn't actually different. The webOS card interface scales to tablet beautifully (I think it was actually better on tablet) and with some additions would scale to desktop as well. We're a decade past the webOS launch and it's still a better UI for everything.Īndroid widgets like Vista widgets, OSX widgets, or KDE widgets failed at their vision because it's usually easier to open an application when you want one. There was even a smaller HP Touchpad in the works at the time (fully working prototypes are found now and then) to diversify the line. The Pre 3 was the only webOS phone that had a genuine shot left, but the HP Touchpad debacle pretty much sealed it. I also had a (Developer) Pre 2 which was incrementally better, and while that was a nice piece of kit, the Palm Pixi was a horrible misstep (with its minuscule size and-gasp-magnetic headphone jack) I first witnessed at their unveiling in San Francisco. Just before HP gave up the webOS ghost, it was a popular homebrew thing to do for a certain contingent.Īs for the original hardware, it could have really used time when there really wasn't any time to spare in the competitive landscape. One could also (as was tradition) infinitely hack around most of the Palm Pre line to enable it in the end. Actually, a webOS phone with a software-keyboard was in fact coming down the pipeline.