HP open sources WebOS TouchPad tablet GUI HP has released the first part of WebOS Community Edition (WOCE), the latest incarnation of the one-time Palm operating system. Aimed at owners of the HP TouchPad tablet, WOCE's first release is based around Luna, the WebOS System Manager and GUI. According to HP, it's availability allows coders to get right into the WebOS …
Expected more from the makers of webOS.
Not sure why you would expect more - it's farking awful (yes, I have a Touchpad - glad I didn't pay more than £99 for it, it's godawful shit riddled with bugs).
Have a read of this (post-mortem on HP, Palm and webOS) - it seems the whole webOS system was developed in chaos with very little plan, and mainly as a reaction to an even shittier system. Hardly surprising they didn't finish it, and I doubt anyone now cares about the open source version - is there even a community to pick it up?
Uhhh, just what we really needed another
"blah-blah-blah-elementary-grade market smarties-blahblah-I-don't-know-crap-about-the=topic-but-needed-to-post-blahblah-blaaa-blahblahbaaa"....
...in the meantime our TouchPads are working fine and WebOS is pretty nice for everyday use, no sign of any of Android's signature slowdowns.
...in the meantime our TouchPads are working fine and WebOS is pretty nice for everyday use, no sign of any of Android's signature slowdowns.
Speak for yourself: WiFi that randomly craps out, web pages that randomly won't load for no obvious reason, Flash playback that can't sustain smooth playback even with a dual-core Qualcomm SoC (and that's when Flash works at all, at other times requiring a reboot to get it going again), sound that distorts at random times and requires a reboot to fix.
Quite honestly, webOS delivers the worst web experience of any mobile device I've used in the last 3 years. The system is riddled with crippling bugs and was never ready for prime time. Read the post-mortem article on The Verge and you have more of a clue why it's so shit.
Neil7: "WiFi that randomly craps out"
This was long ago solved by switching between TKIP/AES, depending on your router's chipset/platform.
Neil7: "web pages that randomly won't load for no obvious reason," See above - it was the WiFi issue... good morning, you're quite a bit late to the party, aren't you?
Neil7: "Flash playback that can't sustain smooth playback even with a dual-core Qualcomm SoC (and that's when Flash works at all, at other times requiring a reboot to get it going again), sound that distorts at random times and requires a reboot to fix."
Flash WORKS, right out of the box, you don't even need the usual Preware w/ Uberkernel - we often use one of our TouchPad to play Youtube videos for our 4-y old princess because it works a LOT better than our Android-based tablet. Same thing true for her occasional Flash games online.
Neil7: "Quite honestly, webOS delivers the worst web experience of any mobile device I've used in the last 3 years."
Quite honestly you clearly somehow managed to miss Android 1.5, Android 1.6, Android 2.1, 2.3, 4.0... or iPhone 2-3-3G-3GS and their utter crap 400MHz-600MHz single core ARM CPUs? Should I mention Windows Phone 7 for the first 18 months of existence?
Seriously, you have clearly no idea what you're talking about.
Neil7: : "The system is riddled with crippling bugs and was never ready for prime time. Read the post-mortem article on The Verge and you have more of a clue why it's so shit."
Ahh I SEE NOW! So as a matter of fact you DO NOT EVEN HAVE IT, NEVER HAD IT, you are just parroting some sh!t article from somewhat, right? :)
Well at least it saves your dignity - you are not utterly and hopelessly clueless about the topic, you're just a mouthpiece, repeating some crap you read somewhere. :)
Meh! Who cares about the underlying OS? (as long as we have bash, ssh and X available)
However, the GUI is a joy to use and knocks the socks off the two major tablet GUIs out in the market.
Did I say "tablet GUI"? They are really phone GUIs which have been scaled up.
The whole overlapping/sliding frame thingy would be great on a pc desktop too. Chrome? Is that you?
I have to admit that the apps are nowhere near as sophisticated as Android/IOS, but that's ok. The browser is fine, flash is fine (if you like that sort of thing), the screen is nice, the media streamer does pretty well with mp4/http.
I haven't found a killer app that would make me ditch it and I'm certainly not about to spend $850 getting a higher resolution device.
@Levente Szileszky - you're obviously a webOS fanboi. In some ways I admire all the Palm stalwarts that refuse to acknowledge the faults in webOS, but for everyone else that doesn't have that background the faults in webOS are plain to see (and yes, I do own a Touchpad, my first ever Palm device).
Perhaps if webOS had received continued care and attention it might have become a usable platform, but quite honestly the versions they released sucked donkey balls. Riddled with system bugs, and apps that stop responding to touch or slow to a crawl. A truly horrible user experience, and one that barely justified the £99 most of us paid for it.
It's odd, I hear these bad things, but I gave a firesale TouchPad to who is effectively my mother in law, and she loves it, and uses it every day, so much so that she got a second hand Pre 3, and likes the consistency between the two. Also, touchstones for both. In constant use. She doesn't even have TV any more, and uses the touchpad all the time.
You are both straining your credibility. I do enjoy my touchpad as well. WebOS is not near as bad as made out here but it is dog slow especially without custom kernels and overclocking. Also the lack of apps is pretty jarring and ultimately makes WebOS a bit of a wasteland sandbox (which would be great for a casual user). As a technogeek the vast majority of the time I am booted into ICS and its incredible ecosystem (long live the Pulse app and Google Chrome Beta). ICS on touchpad is hobbyist and it shows though. The battery life is garbage and their are still some bugs/unimplemented features (where is my battery usage info?) but that has gotten a lot better. Finally plan on flashing a 120+ meg image every week or less on Android as things are changing rapidly. Android is definitely better but no native vendor support does suck and is why the things were so cheap.
And better than the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't of Symbian open sourcing. We can only hope that there's a deadman's switch attached to the Symbian EEG inside Nokia which will dump the source of whatever the final version is (NOT just the head revision, that's often been broken)
Even if webOS is technically dead, that's a step in the right direction and I hope they will eventually release enough so that you can run webOS applications on other platforms such as Android or Ubuntu. There are a lot of cool apps in the webOS app store and it'd be great to be able to give them a second lease of life.
I stopped using my Touchpad just two weeks ago - I just got fed up of the pauses in mail app that caused me to delete multiple emails instead of one etc.
Shame really, as I really wanted WebOS and the TouchPad to be a market leader rather than a has been :(
I tried CyanogenMod 7 and 9 on it, and while it seemed to run OK there were still bugs that I experienced, mainly around wifi.
Again shame, as this could have given the tablet a new lease of life.
Although I couldn't care less about the Mail app I still sync 3 different mailboxes via IMAP (all Google Apps) and they seem to be working fine.
Of course, I hardly ever delete anything - that's pretty much pre-Gmail practice, long outdated, along with using Outlook and other weird stuff.... the search feature alone in Gmail worth the switch to their butt-ugly, utilitarian web UI, this is what I'm telling everybody for years now - apparently pretty successfully because now everyone+dog switched to webmail accounts. :)
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