> WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it Am I missing something?
I must be missing the same, because I had a Palm back in the day, and the OS was IMHO absolute crapware
I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
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Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#12> WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it Am I missing something?
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Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#13The new CEO was brought in to chart the path forward not dwell on the past, and clearly in his eyes the Palm acquisition was a sunk cost. The Touchpad disaster, combined with the CTO completely shirking responsibility for it (as you can tell from this article), probably showed him the writing on the wall.
WebOS was neat for sure but HP was never in a position to compete with Apple. More mobile device launches would simply have meant more money down the drain.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#14> But here's the final piece of the story: Leo Apotheker was fired on September 22, 2011—just 35 days after shutting down WebOS and eleven months after taking over as CEO. The board finally recognized the systematic thinking errors that had destroyed billions in value, but it was too late for WebOS.
Is this actually the case?
I guess optically it might look bad to undo the WebOS but maybe just announce development of a NetOS which is the same except in name? Definitely people will be upset about the cancelation but retailers still have what 225k units they'd want to move so they can't be that upset about it uncanceled?
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#15> WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it Am I missing something?
3rd party apps couldn't do anything in the background until iOS 4, and it's always been a bit limited.
I think he's wrong about Android, although AFAIK Palm had a nicer task switching UI at first.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#16> WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it Am I missing something?
I must be missing the same, because I had a Palm back in the day, and the OS was IMHO absolute crapware
Palm didn’t have a WebOS product on market until 2009 and HP acquired them less than a year later.
I don’t think HP was remotely interested in the previous operating system.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#17Can’t really speak to the business side of things - or if HP and WebOS really could’ve gained market share in mobile - but this reminded me I had a WebOS LG TV in 2015-2017, and in retrospect it was both very snappy and quite good-looking compared to the native interface of every TV I’ve had since.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#18webOS very much feels like a path not taken in mobile technology, it really was slick to use, even though as this fella mentioned it wasnt polished in terms of what was released.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#19> WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it Am I missing something?
When WebOS was released, it had multitasking whereas iOS and Android froze background apps?
Dunno, it's a pretty straightforward statement.
WebOS was a legit Linux OS and had a lot of good features...
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#20> WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it Am I missing something?
Your question is unclear but I assume you are thinking that iOS has always supported "multitasking". This is not the case. iOS4 introduced it on the iPhone side, and this is how AnandTech [1] describes it:
"To switch between apps on the iOS3 you hit the home button, which takes you home, and then select your next app. Your previous app, assuming it isn’t one of a very limited list of apps that have services that can run in the background (e.g. iPod, checking email), quits completely. Switching back to the previous app relaunches it."
"In iOS 4 Apple promises app level multitasking without sacrificing performance or battery life. A single push of the home button still takes you home, but a double tap will bring up a list of recently used apps along the bottom of the screen. Scroll to find the one you want to switch to, select it and you’ve just “multitasked” in iOS 4."
Even on the Palm Pilot, you could switch reasonably quickly between, say, the Memo Pad and the Calendar, and not lose context in either app because they restarted. The OS was structured around giving apps the ability to freeze their state easily and rapidly thaw it later. I believe Android had some stuff for that, but it wasn't as comprehensive as what Palm had, and I can't speak to iOS APIs at all.
(In 2025, the "solution" to this is largely to just leave the apps running in the background like a desktop, now that cell phones are substantially more powerful today than the desktops of the WebOS era. Whether WebOS could have made a superior phone back in the day, we'd still be where we are today either way.)
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3779/apples-ios-4-explored/2