Reply to post: Doesn't give an obvious reason

Doesn't give an obvious reason

The article and the website do not appear to give obvious reasons why people should jump on this at all. The website hypes up ( a bit) how this version is better than previous WebOS versions(info that obviously most new potential users of the code would not understand/care), but other than saying it's good and easy doesn't show evidence how it is better than alternatives out there.

I was a loyal WebOS customer until the end myself, originally went to it because I had some Palm OS apps I really liked and there was an emulator available that ran them pretty flawlessly on my Sprint Palm Pre (eventually HP broke the system so the emulator wouldn't work anymore). I still have my Pre3(two of em, a US and a French one, different keyboard), and I have 4 HP Touchpads (3 from the "fire sale"), one of which has never been taken out of the shipping box.

A big innovation that WebOS devices brought at least that I wasn't aware existed other places was "wireless" charging. When I finally jumped ship from WebOS to Galaxy Note 3 (which is still my daily driver), I remember how much I missed wireless charging. Then eventually Samsung released a back cover that gave wireless charging ability and that was great.

I am not sure how long Android beam has been around for but I remember early hype about HP Touch-to-share on WebOS (As far as I know it only worked on Pre3 and HP Touchpads), where you could use some form of NFC to send data between devices. At the time I think the only thing that worked was sending website urls, but there was talk about doing a lot more.

I use Android(and Samsung's) beam quite regularly myself between devices. Other than that I really don't use NFC for anything(I have some bluetooth speakers that can use NFC for pairing but I don't need to pair very often).

My Touchpads still get daily use as digital picture frames, sitting in their touchstone wireless charging stands.

Fortunately I have not had to set up any legacy webos devices again since HP shut the webos cloud down. I know it's possible to do but haven't needed to (no need to factory reset to fix a problem etc).

One area WebOS was weak on though was internal design, from what I recall basically everything ran as root, which was simple but of course not that secure. I did like a lot how I could access a root prompt by typing in a simple developer pass code and connecting a usb cable. No having to hack/root the devices. I have read Tizen has very poor security as well.

It wouldn't surprise me if 80% of the code that made up what HP had as WebOS is re-written at this point, as it stood it was a good proof of concept but needed a lot of work, and they didn't commit the resources required(I guesstimated it would of been a few billion, with the numbers going up the farther it fell behind) to get it up to speed with Android. It was flashy on the surface but it was rotting inside. Doesn't surprise me too much the state of WebOS at the time as Palm had to whip something up really fast after they surrendered their other smart phone OS(s), and they were running out of time/money I believe at the time. HP just sort of piled on top of that.

The webos OSE site on casually browsing doesn't mention really anything out side of the highest level stuff they are working with, and the FAQ is pretty bare bones as well.

Since LG makes far more than just TVs, they should show a bit more commitment by using the code in more of their device lineup.