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Why Geeks Should Love HP WebOS

developer.palm.com

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Re: Why Geeks Should Love HP WebOS

#31

Post by unwiredben »

benjoffe wrote: post #28

Wow, browsing that site from my phone is a crippling experience, they have this: ..yet they haven't actually optimized the site properly for a small display, meaning it's not actually possible to scroll/zoom to see any full line of text (tested on iPhone).

I've passed this on to our dev portal design team. I hope we can get a fix for the blog theme soon; the scaling broke as part of a portal redesign back in March.

Re: Why Geeks Should Love HP WebOS

#32

Post by johnrob »

Why haven't they made a tool/framework for porting WebOS apps (non-native) to iOS & android? This would be a great way to leverage their superior developer experience to get more apps on their platform.

Re: Why Geeks Should Love HP WebOS

#33

Post by azakai »

WebOS is definitely very cool.

I doubt WebOS can overtake Android or iOS at this point, but it should be a solid third place in this market (I don't think other competitors like WP7 or Bada can make it).

Re: Why Geeks Should Love HP WebOS

#34

Post by evangineer »

blinkingled wrote: post #9

webOS sorely needs Galaxy S2 class hardware. HP should stop all else and get a slick device out like yesterday.

One of my main issues with WebOS from day one has been the lack of what I would regard as decent hardware.

Another issue in the past, which I hope has much improved since is the developer outreach which really sucked when I tried to engage. This was pre-HP acquisition. The fact that @unwiredben is active in this discussion is a good sign.

Re: Why Geeks Should Love HP WebOS

#35

Post by evangineer »

johnrob wrote: post #32

Why haven't they made a tool/framework for porting WebOS apps (non-native) to iOS & android? This would be a great way to leverage their superior developer experience to get more apps on their platform.

A compatibility layer on top of say PhoneGap could do the job. There would be a bit of a performance hit I imagine though. I doubt that V8 is any faster on Android than it is on WebOS, but the added layer of abstraction would slow things down a bit on non-WebOS platforms.

Re: Why Geeks Should Love HP WebOS

#36

Post by rbanffy »

gkatsev wrote: post #15
brianwillis wrote: post #5

Just tap on the “Just Type” search bar and enter “upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart” (the classic NES Konami code!); an icon appears that lets you toggle this mode on and off. Wait, really? If that's not a joke, then it's kind of cool.

Yep, the konami code to get into dev mode has been in webos since the very beginning. I am talking webos 1.0. Also, WebOs is great. I really like it and the UI but so far the devices have been fairly unimpressive. The original Palm Pre was good for about 3 months. After which android and iphone have gotten so many updates. If the Palm Pre 3 lives up to it's ideal, it would definitely be worth a look but unfortunately…

I am quite happy with my Pre 2 (a gift by the developer program - they aren't sold in Brazil). There are a couple issues, as it appears to have never been tested here - GPS seems slow and may have a bug in its software, various reception weirdnesses (hard to get it to use 3G), but, overall, it's a very solid and responsive phone.

I expect the 3 to up that a notch. Right now, I prefer it over iPhone and Android, as actually doing things (as opposed as to opening programs) happens more fluidly.

Re: Why Geeks Should Love HP WebOS

#37

Post by rbanffy »

plainOldText wrote: post #23

I think WebOS is great. But all the Palm devices are sliders which kinda sucks. I wish they'd come up with something comparable with Nexus S or iPhone 4. A simple, but cool nice little piece of smartphone. But, that's just me.

I actually like the slider keyboard. If offers much better typing than an iPhone 4 and infinitely better than Androids.

Re: Why Geeks Should Love HP WebOS

#38

Post by noonespecial »

I love it simply because its the best SSH experience of all of the smartphones. One click gets me the phones real terminal and then "ssh -l me whereever.com". No bogus setup screens, with each server requiring a 5 minute fill in the blank session to connect to, no menus full of special keys to transmit (most covered with the orange key), just pure .ssh/id_dsa public key in my home-dir win.

Its 10x easier than the best thing on my ipad and its with me 24/7 because it also happens to be my phone. Other problems with WebOS and Pre? Sure there are. This makes up for all of them. Smartphone makers: rent-seek my terminal, you lose.

Re: Why Geeks Should Love HP WebOS

#39

Post by Xuzz »

johnrob wrote: post #32

Why haven't they made a tool/framework for porting WebOS apps (non-native) to iOS & android? This would be a great way to leverage their superior developer experience to get more apps on their platform.

Their next app (web?) framework, Enyo, does exactly this (in fact, apps are developed in Chrome). They haven't announced the licensing options (i.e. if it will be legal to use on other platforms), but I've run the betas of it on my iPad and they work quite well.

When webOS 3.0 comes out, it's really up to HP Palm if they want to allow this.

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