I have become the unofficial standard bearer for webOS, the operating system created by Palm for the Pre and its successive devices. It was a wildly innovative and smart foundation for a smartphone done in by performance problems, mediocre hardware, and most of all by US carriers who acted as kingmakers for other companies.
So as the bearer of a thoroughly-tattered banner, I’ve been hearing a lot of people ask what I thought about the iPhone X and how it borrows many of the ideas first introduced by Palm. Here’s what I think: it’s great, and also it’s silly compare the state of tech in 2017 with the state of tech in 2009. Just because Palm did some stuff first doesn’t take away from Apple is doing them now. Context matters, and our context today is very different.
WebOS had some great ideas, but on a technical level, the operating system was a mess. It was a major battery hog, slow, and basically nothing more than a tech demo made in WebKit on top of a largely unmodified Linux kernel, running on mediocre hardware. WebOS wasn’t a product worthy of the Palm name.
The irony is that if they’d managed to stick with it for another few years, webkit-on-Linux would be completely fine for most mobile tasks on current hardware.
“WebOS had some great ideas, but on a technical level, the operating system was a mess. It was a major battery hog, slow, and basically nothing more than a tech demo made in WebKit on top of a largely unmodified Linux kernel, running on mediocre hardware.”
I can’t agree with that. Please look back at what Android was then (and most of the “then-Android” mess still annoys me in the latest versions), and compare it with WebOS… Battery hog ? My Pre3 (still) runs about 36 hours without needing a charge, I remember my collegues who _cable_charges their iphones twice a day…
No mobile OS has yet reached the ease of use of WebOS GUI, nor its capacities in multitasking.
OK, the OS wasn’t perfect, and yes the hardware was messy. But don’t forget two things :
– 1st most of the failure was due to the policy of mobile phone carriers (I never quite understand the “carrier&phone” exclusivity system. Anyone should always have been able to choose either carrier or phone)
– 2nd : when HP entered in the game the palm team was given a 3-years delay to reach a fully-grown webOS, aiming to reach a multi-devices ecosystem, able to run on phones, tablets, TVs, printers, … Then, after one year and the first prototype Leo ran into it and F… it all. Well, this OS wasn’t slow, messy or anything else. And, matter of fact, it was very promising, if only it had been given its chances.
Edited 2017-09-16 07:31 UTC
Fully agree with you.
> No mobile OS has yet reached the ease of use of WebOS GUI, nor its capacities in multitasking.
AOSP has full floating multiwindow. It’s entirely the manufacturers’ fault they haven’t turned that on for tablets or convertibles.
I haven’t used WebOS so I can’t really speak for that;
But the N900 and N9 (Maemo and MeeGo) had awesome Multitasking, and the single MeeGo phone had the easiest to use interface out of any of them. I still miss using mine all the time…
Floating multi-window was added I think to the TouchWiz Samsung things first, then later on added to standard Android, like a lot of things, seems Samsung tries to implement the features, does a crap job the first time, gets it right the second, then about 4 or 5 revisions in, plain Android gets the same feature (shortly before iOS does for most things)
Nah, I’m not bitter at all that MS screwed up the once great Nokia…
Eh, Nokia wasn’t that great. Maemo/MeeGo projects took too long, with restarts along the way (your 2 devices are a testament to that, quite different…) were not helped by internal infighting between it and Symbian and S40 divisions. When MeeGo was getting somewhere with N9, it was already too late / Android had too much momentum (and Nokia board really disliked Android, that’s why they brought a MS guy to the CEO position, they wanted WinPhone / MS didn’t screw them)
Meanwhile Nokia was selling for too many years hardly changing products, just in many packagings.
Edited 2017-09-18 21:25 UTC
Never used a phone with webOS but I used a crappy HP tablet around 2011 or 2012 with it and… what was so “easy” about it??? To me it was horrible and unresponsive. o_O
Back then iOS5 was much simpler and agile. I’ve found webOS similar to GNOME and that’s not a compliment exactly… btw I have no idea if webOS was better or worse than iOS at technical level but It wasn’t simpler or easier to use than iOS and it looked terrible.
Maybe webOS was better than Android, thanks God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, I didn’t have to use Android in 2011 so I cannot compare them.
“Back then iOS5 was much simpler and agile.”
That may be why iOS7 “borrowed” WebOS cards to manage its (not backgroud-active) mutitasking
“Never used a phone with webOS but I used a crappy HP tablet around 2011 or 2012 with it and… what was so “easy” about it??? To me it was horrible and unresponsive. o_O ”
– Swipe up from border : “cards” multi-task view
– Swipe card up : close the app (but keep most in background for a while, so it can re-open faster)
– Swipe card down : kill the app
(and on phones : swipe the border from right to left = back)
Way more easier than short-press, long-press, double-press, the center button.
BTW : I used a (not so crappy :p) iOS phone around 2014 and… it was horribly laggy, battery hungry and unresponsive…
So I explained my friend how he could kill his 78 (yes, really) background apps swiping them up
I wouldn’t rely on that 5 minutes experience to declare anywhere that iOS is messy and crappy 
About the rest, yes you’re right it wasn’t eye-candy, but that’s not what I was talking about
As someone who had the opportunity to take a look into WebOS source at the time…. Man, I have no idea how that worked at all in the end!
Before WebOS, there was a common knowledge that Palm programmer were great, they did magic. Well, I can tell you that they did a mess in the code. In just one application, with more than 2 million lines of code, I could find only two comments in the code, that did not described what they were doing at all.
And other people, who looked in other pieces of the OS code, also had the same results and impressions, this is not only my personal take in the matter.
It is a fine software running, but supporting that code, in the future, would be hell.
“Man, I have no idea how that worked at all in the end! ”
E pur si muove
!
Spoken like someone who owned – what – one used Palm Pre four years after it came out, and played around with it for one hot minute? Of course it will seem slow that much later and the battery will be poor on such an old device… Thom’s knack for hyperbole never fails.
I owned a Palm Pre 2 for a couple of years and it was one of the best phones I ever owned. It had cards, multi-tasking, wireless charging, unobtrusive notifications, universal search, and a centralized address book and messaging across all online platforms before any other platform, and in some respects still implemented it better than any other platform has since. Not to mention that the technology – using web technologies to build everything – is now standard practice in the industry – and considering the timeframe we are talking about performance was impressive. The slide-out physical keyboard – whose mechanism was perfected on the Palm Pre 2 – was icing on the cake. The Palm Pre (1 and 2) were mind-blowing at the time, and Palm should feel honored that they managed to release such an awesome, revolutionary product in the late stages of the company’s decline.
Edited 2017-09-17 07:07 UTC
First someone gave me a PalmPilot and I thought “what the hell am I going to do with this thing?”. Well, within a couple of days I knew . . .brilliant!
Then I got a Palm III, defunct alas, in spite of new batteries – cap rot maybe.
Then I got a Tungsten T3 that I used for ages, until cellphones became more capable. I rediscovered it a few years ago and ordered a new battery and it was fine.
Guess it needs another new battery now – I wonder if you can still get them?
Beautifully made all of ’em and did everything I needed with charges lasting for weeks (well, not the T3 . . .)
Now I have some darn fancy cellphone that does a million things that I don’t need and exposes me to all the malware on the Web, as well as making every detail of my very unremarkable life available to the world.
Life was easier then.
Mac
Didn’t the Meego/Sailfish UI employ gestures too?
Yeah, I have Sailfish on my Nexus 4 and it’s all gesture based. I really like it and hope it takes off, but I really doubt it. I’m keeping it in my OS pile, though. I still run a few WebOS devices, a LuneOS device, and a Sailfish device. Fun to mess with non-Android and iOS systems. I’m going to use SailfishOS to learn QT.
Too many gestures and not enough visible controls can make the UI difficult to discover. I think that’s the problem with gesture-based systems. If you have too many and they’re not obvious, you end up with a CLI-like situation where you have to rtfm to understand the UI. I think Apple’s starting to go down this route, unfortunately. Users don’t want to rtfm. This is what Apple used to understand. If the user has to read a manual to figure out the basic operation of your system, you’ve already failed.
Just want to point out that being able to run on a “largely unmodified Linux kernel” is a good thing. It is much better then requiring a heavily modified kernel anyway.
The big problem with WebOS was it wasn’t how most people used mobile devices at the time. Too many hacky tricks to get all the features to work on such limited hardware. And people didn’t need most of them at the moment.
Apple knew this. That is why early versions of iOS had so many less features then WebOS. But the features they did have they made sure they worked well. WebOS had a lot of features and good ideas. But the stuff that worked well wasn’t necessary what people needed at the moment.
A decade later with much faster device such features can be implemented properly without crazy hacks to get them to work. Also a lot of people have moved to their phone as a primary device, so these features we may have seen in WebOS will actually be needed and used.
Back then Apple was fighting over iTunes sync issues with “non-Apple” devices and Google was trying hard to lock users in.
Palm had nothing of the kind.
Even today most users don’t know what they want .. They just want easy access to all the services they are using within a simple to use device.
I still remember the finishing touch of ArsTechnica for it.. “It was its great success that led to its failure on the market as well”.
iPhone x is launched and getting very good responses. The features included in this are too good.
http://gamingtoolkit.net/“>best
Thom,
I remember you expressing the same sentiment at the end of the Palm retrospective – I let it slide them, because it seemed like a throwaway comment that was based mainly on a bad first-impression, rather than the result of any substantial analysis or insight.
But since that now seems to the “official” OSNews position on webOS, I think it deserves comment:
While subjective, and while I don’t agree – I can still understand where you’re coming from on that one. I went from a Treo 680 to a Pre2 and had almost the same exact same reaction at first – partly, I think, because it had a vaguely similar aesthetic to PalmOS, so I had expected that it would work the same way. That said, after 6 months or so using of the Pre2 and getting used to the differences in the UI & the new concepts introduced in webOS, I came to prefer it to the older OS – and when booting up the Treo to look for an old contact, I was struck by how much clunkier & archaic the PalmOS UI felt in comparison.
I realize I’m starting to run up against the character limit – so I’ll just end by saying: if genuinely you want to give webOS a fair shake & the depth of analysis it deserves on the best hardware it shipped on, then I’d strongly recommend picking up a Pre3 – the Pre2, while decent, really didn’t do it as much justice as its predecessor (the 3 was a worthwhile upgrade just for the larger screen & VASTLY improved keyboard). They can be found for peanuts on eBay – hell, I have two of them & would be happy to give you my spare as long as you covered the cost of shipping it from Canada.