Slashdot Mirror
The webOS Features Other OSes Should Steal
New submitter egparedes points out a post dissecting webOS and highlighting the things it did right, in the hopes that developers for other mobile operating systems will use them as inspiration. Quoting:
"webOS isn't quite dead yet. It's just being open-sourced, which, when it happens to commercial software, often turns out to be the digital equivalent of being reanimated as a walking corpse in a George Romero movie. ... Of course, it's not assured that this is the end of webOS. Maybe open-sourcing it will be the best thing that ever happened to webOS. But maybe it just means that HP doesn't care anymore, and that webOS won't receive much attention anymore. This would be unfortunate, because webOS is one of the few current mobile operating systems that are actually a joy to use. It's been hurt by HP's incompetent management, rather than any egregious faults of its own. The least we can do now is to keep its best ideas alive, even if webOS itself won't make it."
There was a waiting list for the original phones when they first came out and they sold out quickly. And WebOS was fantastic. But...
- the phones themselves had battery problems (if you slid the phone closed too quickly the phone would job the battery out and the phone would cut off)
- as cool as the phone was, it was too damn small. Slab phones were becoming the preferred interface for smartphones.
- as cool as the OS was, the user base wanted it built on, with extra features added, and Palm decided for whatever reason that it was going to focus on incremental things instead of sweeping new feature sets.
- battery life was not good. Seriously. It was freaking horrible. Worse than your standard android phone.
All these things worked against it, plus Sprint decided it was more in love with HTC, so Palm didn't get the kind of backing it was hoping for. But Palm did fumble a few times before HP took it over, so you're right that HP can't shoulder all the blame.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
That's right, I said it.
... right, I hope that WebOS finds itself a firm footing somewhere, truly I do.
No complaints apart from hardware and the lack of a tide app.
Contrary to popular spouting off a smartphone doesn't need the Internet except when you need the Internet. How you choose to draw that line should be your choice, not your phone's.
There's no such thing as "rooting". Got root.
Tweaking the thing can bring easy and quick rewards with a tiny bit of css and a tiny bit of html.
I didn't get the fire sale pad but not for the lack of trying.
I had an ipad once - it was a gift - it wanted iTunes on my computer - then it wanted the correct version of iTunes - then it wanted an OSX upgrade - then I lost interest - I traded it for a new suspension kit for my ride. Couldn't be happier. iWhat? Nothing.
What was I
\r
He seem to never heard of Maemo or the N900. If well not successful (for some values of successful, at least) had a lot of ideas other OSes should copy. In front of Android i felt crippled after more than a year with Maemo, mainly because how natural was for me to be really running several applications at once, even with that hardware. Maemo development diverted to Meego, that ended losing ground by the 2 companies backing it, and now could be in the horizon Tizen, Meltemi or whatever ends being the flavor of the semester.
WebOS is good anyway, even when the environment seemed to be with less community push than Maemo. A lot of its features, joined with maemo/meego/whatever ones, could make an interesting portable device OS. But the handset makers and carriers had already picked their alternatives, and there is little room for others (specially, without big enough backers), what is a shame,
Steve Jobs made a career of it.
And Samsung read his book!
Except that they didn't.
Most of Samsung's ideas were built upon the ideas of Google (which is the point of Android).
The notion that Samsung copied Apple only exists in the minds of fanboys who've never touched a Samsung Galaxy phone or tablet.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Document management on iOS is a mess. Every application implements its own scheme.
This is probably one of the best notes he makes. While hiding document management from the user initially may simplify things, the reality is that every single user needs sophisticated document management in the long run. iOS's biggest mistake was here; simpler document management should equate to more elegant, more usable document management, not more naieve management.
Its saddening to me today that Windows 7 search / OSX's Spotlight still don't meet the level of sophistication that zsh's globbing syntax does. Where are the document systems that automatically cross reference, sort by category etc? The filesystem on my PC is less sophisticated than google search by orders of magnitude, and slower too. Whats worse is that the iOS act of simply removing it from the users view is trying to creep back into the PC world.