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LG acquires webOS from HP, plans to use it in smart TV platform

engadget.com

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Re: LG acquires webOS from HP, plans to use it in smart TV platform

#41

Post by ansible »

geon wrote: post #5

I have difficult to see what advantage webOS has on a TV. With no touch (?) they need to completely redesign the interface anyway.

The could pair it with a Kinect style gesture interface.

Sigh. I really find TVs with enhanced features that useful. The problem is that the software goes out of date very quickly, and I am entirely dependent on the TV manufacturer for updates, which will likely stop shortly after the TV goes out of production (which is what, 6 months these days).

All I really want out of a TV is good picture quality, and a bunch of input ports. For video streaming, gaming, and other apps, I prefer to have a separate box for that, which can be replaced and/or upgraded less expensively.

Re: LG acquires webOS from HP, plans to use it in smart TV platform

#42

Post by mikeryan »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #30
koralatov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just signals that there is a hole in the market for an open source smart TV platform. Is there, though? I'm pretty technical, and very interested in the whole FLOSS thing, and I'm pretty much of the `meh' contingent when it comes my TV's software's licensing. All I really care about is turning the damn thing on, watching what I want, when I want, and being able to afford to rent the stuff I want to watch. Now ta…

I think you missed my point. That consumers only care about their programming being available is precisely why an open platform is needed. If LG releases a smart TV that doesn't have Netflix, Hulu, MLB.tv, Amazon, etc. they look bad in the eye of the consumer. Those content providers are currently building out separate apps for each TV platform, or at least for the ones big enough to move the needle.

Pretty much all the current crop of smart tvs use HTML as their primary app platform. It's pretty consistently WebKit with a few custom integration points for TV specific functions. For all intents and purposes there is already a consistent open platform for apps on TVs

I own a small agency who builds apps for these platforms we can hit LG/Samsung/Panasonic/Sharp/Sony tvs with a single code base now. There are still a few outlier platforms like Yahoo Roku etc but HTML now gets us ~80% of the market.

Re: LG acquires webOS from HP, plans to use it in smart TV platform

#43

Post by emehrkay »

pinaceae wrote: post #40

this tweet by Kontra sums it up: WebOS has been targeted to mini-phones, larger smartphones, tablets, printers & now TVs. Won't stop until you see it on a LG refrigerator. https://twitter.com/counternotions/status/306014344876023808

Imagine a situation where you'a query your fridge from the market and it tells you that you're low on milk or have 8 eggs so no need to get more.

Re: LG acquires webOS from HP, plans to use it in smart TV platform

#45

Post by jzwinck »

mattquiros wrote: post #44

But of all the hardware makers, LG? They make ugly products. Innovation is not really in their DNA. I wonder where this is going.

Ugly is in the eye of the beholder, but LG moves a ton of product, and could put WebOS somewhere it has never been so far: in the hands and homes of millions of consumers.

The real question is whether the UX will be beautiful on TVs with remote controls. It was on the Pre, but that's nothing similar.

Re: LG acquires webOS from HP, plans to use it in smart TV platform

#46

Post by Indyan »

mattquiros wrote: post #44

But of all the hardware makers, LG? They make ugly products. Innovation is not really in their DNA. I wonder where this is going.

LG's 3D TV range is actually quite good. The Cinema3D series of smart TVs have a lot going for them including great display, beautiful elegant design, and an intuitive remote.

Re: LG acquires webOS from HP, plans to use it in smart TV platform

#47

Post by Indyan »

ansible wrote: post #41
geon wrote: post #5

I have difficult to see what advantage webOS has on a TV. With no touch (?) they need to completely redesign the interface anyway.

The could pair it with a Kinect style gesture interface. Sigh . I really find TVs with enhanced features that useful. The problem is that the software goes out of date very quickly, and I am entirely dependent on the TV manufacturer for updates, which will likely stop shortly after the TV goes out of production (which is what, 6 months these days). All I really want out of a TV is good picture quality, and a bunch of…

Yeah. LG's high end smart TVs have something called Magic Remote. It's no kinect, but an improved version of this might work well with an WebOS adapted for the big screen. http://www.lg.com/global/magicremote/

Re: LG acquires webOS from HP, plans to use it in smart TV platform

#49

Post by CaveTech »

r4vik wrote: post #48
mattquiros wrote: post #44

But of all the hardware makers, LG? They make ugly products. Innovation is not really in their DNA. I wonder where this is going.

Nexus 4 is ugly?

Definitely not at the cutting edge of phone design either.

Re: LG acquires webOS from HP, plans to use it in smart TV platform

#50

Post by onli »

DeepDuh wrote: post #33
thiagoperes wrote: post #28

Not using WebOS on smartphones is really a waste. Palm failed but I still think it was an OS ahead of its time.

Sometimes 'ahead of its time' is not such a good thing. Specifically, when the available hardware can't keep up with what the system design demands[1], e.g. a responsive smartphone touch interface created in an interpreter (as far as I can see without even having a JIT compiler) on a 500Mhz embedded CPU, without GPU acceleration[2]. It was ahead of its time alright. [1] http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/01/02/021…

Sure, running too taxing software on unaccelerated hardware is a bad thing. But webOS wasn't slow. It had sporadic slowdown and then it really was slow, but in normal state it sure could compete speedwise.

It was buggy, the scrolling felt slow because the settings were wrong (as proven by the buttah-patch), same for the animations, the default-browser lacks html5-support, the connectivity of the phones is bad, pages often don't load without a reason even when on wlan (and when not, it often fails to fetch a slowly loading page bit for bit, which was made even worse because the browser would reload that page the moment it was loaded because he was inactive too long(!)) - it wasn't performance that was the issue here.

So maybe LG really can take the system and make something out of it. The tile-system sure could work on TVs designed to be used with a remote-touchpad-controller.

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