That's it. HP has announced the discontinuation of all WebOS-based hardware, including all mobile phones and tablets. They plan to explore licensing the software to others however. Yeah, good luck with that. It's a non-starter unless Google pulls Android from OEMs other than Motorola.

And even bigger shocker, HP is also going to discuss possibly splitting off its PC business as well. Seems they're strongly thinking about enterprise-only. And printers.

*snif*
I'll have to go put batteries in my old Handspring PDA for old time's sake.

Unsurprising, but still sad. The writing was on the wall in massive bold letters when the pace of OS updates slowed to a crawl 6-8 months ago, and the Pre2/Pre3 releases kept getting pushed back.

Palm did a lot with very little in terms of developing a very capable OS, and some of their ideas live on in Android and iOS, just as the WebOS team stole ideas from Android and iOS in the beginning. I don't know what HPalm's patent stash looks like, but I think Google should at least kick the tires on a deal to snap up whatever else was in the pipeline when the music stopped.

Ouch. WebOS still interests me, but it just never found any traction. They lacked the skills Apple has to be a monolithic solution with good developer support, and they lacked the ability to compete with the "free" Android alternative if they had chosen to license it.

The big issue is that HP didn't learn anything at all from Palm's own Pre launch failure. How on earth did they believe their tablet would do any business, especially released unfinished. Frankly, they should have just not released any product at all if they weren't committed to mobile handsets. Avoiding the retail failures of mobile would have saved them a bundle. They could have spent the time shopping around a license deal or coming up with a better way to monetize those licenses than just asking for up-front or per-unit cash.

Who would have thought that Apple would become the world's largest computer maker (units shipped and profit), and that the number two company would suddenly think about partially closing up shop. Wow.

This looks very ugly:

From my experience at Compaq going into the HP merger, it sounds about right though. There was this bad culture there where the public usually found out about major moves like this before the employees inside.

This also explains why news was out there about the Pre 3 phone launching in Europe and coming soon to the US.

Overall it really seems like the Palm team was screwed over by the Mark Hurd CEO controversy. He was at the helm when HP acquired Palm, and now Apotheker is there, gutting one of the key Hurd decisions.

Several years ago, I happened to be sitting on a plane next to a chatty HP executive. He was explaining to me that HP's size gave them serious purchasing power for things like hard drives and that this allowed them to do well in the consumer market. Well, now we see that this it's about more than just managing your profit margin.

So far as I can tell, the only other company out there that's had a history of trying to be truly innovative in its PC hardware design is Sony. Back in the day, the Sony 505's were the best subnotebook around, bar none, and the current Vaio Z is still pushing the boundaries (lightweight laptop, clever docking station with its own GPU, etc.). But, I have to say, after my experience ten years ago with the 505, I have no desire to ever deal with Sony customer service ever again.

HP service, even enterprise service (on servers, anyway), is also lousy.

I never thought I'd say it, but it was a breath of fresh air when I had to call Dell.

What problem did u have? HP was always decent with us (servers too), even though improvable.

TouchPads are now $99 for 16GB and $149 for 32GB models, at least in Canada.

Having worked on the Proliant support team in the past, I could possibly see where Bitt had some bad experiences. Post merger, Carly, or some other high end HP exec really didn't like how much the support division was costing the company. They started outsourcing enterprise non contract support, and later even started doing so on the contract side a bit. This was also around the time when the company was under a pay freeze policy, including for promotions.

The combination of those two things was disastrous. Employees were either being culled in layoffs, or leaving due to the lack of being able to earn more money as they took on tougher positions. They did back off on the outsourcing on contracts when several high profile customers were complaining. But the warranty only support took a big hit.

Compaq took enterprise support very seriously when I started. All people on the frontline phone support had 9 weeks of in depth hands on training time. Then about 2 weeks of shadowing on the call floor. I'm not sure how drastically this changed once the company was HP, as we never hired any new support engineers at the site I worked at.

Basically, every HP support tech I've spoken with in the last three months has been in India. I have political issues with that, but I'm willing to ignore it as a computer professional. However, they are universally horrible at speaking English, and whether due to their lack of English comprehension, lack of training, or just general idiocy, I usually have to explain any sort of problem over and over again. Also, one engineer I spoke with was so unintelligible that I had to force him to communicate via email, and he would regularly decide to stop and call anyway.

I don't have anything against Indian people, but these were employees clearly unfit to provide service to English-speaking customers. I suspect they may be unfit to provide technical support to anyone, regardless of their language, but I can't prove that.

Dell enterprise support largely has well-trained, US-based (and, therefore, generally with good English communication skills) techs. They clearly understand their technology well, and are personable. Again, other than politics, I don't have any requirement to deal with Americans; I've dealt with Australians working for Cisco tech support, and that was pretty good. The issue is the language barrier. The kinds of problems I generally call for are hard to explain on their own, nevermind trying to also work through failure to understand grammatical tenses properly.

Taym, I would suspect that Italian, not being a commonly spoken language other than in Italy (and surrounding regions), your Italian-speaking techs are actually native Italian speakers, and you probably don't have this issue.

I've found that going out on a heavy drinking binge with these people helps my comprehension dramatically.
Not so easy to do over the phone, but not impossible...

I see what u mean Bitt. Interestingly, i noticed that our care pack calls on servers are dealt with by local official HP partner where in fact our contacts have been native Italian speakers. But warranty calls are handled by call centers usually in Eastern EU, and while with HP we've been sufficiently happy, it can get really bad, just as u describe.

... Once i decided to ask for an English speaking person, in the hope things would improve. I could really not get 3 out of 4 words. I Felt bad, honestly, as i could picture this poor guy trying his best in an underpaid job, but i was desperate. The English speaking guy was better, fortunately.

I decided to pick up one of the fire sale 32GB TouchPads from Amazon (I was unlucky in my quest to find a 16GB model.)

Even if rumors of an Android port don't pan out (and I think there's probably more involved there than people are letting on) I figure it'll be useful as a small device to keep in the kitchen for my wife and I to maintain our grocery list, view photos, weather info, etc. It's also nice that they finally released the Kindle app a couple of months ago.

Heck, for the prices they're going for now, I think they're a good buy even if they're just used as nothing other than a digital picture frame.

Can you set them to turn on/off at specific times of day? A digital picture frame needs that ability. Is there a picture frame type app for them that pulls pictures off the network? It's also be nice if said app supported RAW formats.

I'd buy one for $99 to use as a picture frame.

I'm not sure. On my Pre there was a "Mode Switcher" app that could change power status / brightness / etc. based on date, time, and many other things (similar to Tasker on Android) but I don't know if it would work on a TouchPad.

Even if it doesn't, I think the homebrew community is going to get a nice shot in the arm with this fire sale, and someone will come up with something.

Has to be done...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaeOXyA7wo0&feature=youtu.be

Cheers

Cris

Sadly few of them do. Most seem to be $120 pieces of crap. Whether the TouchPad is able to do this or not, it's still a great price for a digital photo frame compared to the rest of the market.

Tony, that's a brilliant idea. I hadn't even thought about using it for that purpose. I might suddenly be in the market for one too...

Yeah, and it's funny, because I'm clearly on the record here as not really understanding the appeal of tablets, but the calculus changes a lot at these price levels. Dropping $400 for something to view slideshows, browse recipes, and maintain grocery lists sounds silly, but at $100, suddenly it sounds pretty compelling.

The next decision will be if I feel the need to shell out for the Touchstone dock for it, which will end up costing almost as much as I paid for the device itself.

+1

Somewhat ironic that I ordered mine via my iPad while on a weekend trip. I'm generally against jailbreaking my iOS devices since Apple also keeps adding features in updates that I want. Repeating the jailbreak dance just isn't worth it to me anymore. With the Touchpad, it will give me a stable hacking platform to tinker with, since I doubt we will see any updates.

On the Android porting front, I bet someone will get the basics working, but never make it feel correct. Much of the work to make it proper is at the driver level, especially with power management. So far, drivers are still the main reason that my Android phone (an older iPhone) just isn't usable beyond going "hey look, I have Android on an iPhone".

Tony, I'll be curious to hear your impressions, especially since you are a former Pre owner. One of the difference I think I remember between the phone and tablet is the loss of the off screen gesture area.

I tried to pull the trigger on one, but the HP site is so hosed that I have no idea if I got it or not. I figure if it comes, ok, and if not, ok. I'm not even sure I have time to dink with it.

The TouchPad section on the UK site just ends in a 404

...and a quick scan of UK retailers shows that they're still asking full price at the moment.

Same thing here in Germany.

I totally agree, and that's been my point from the beginning. I don't think that tablets are inherently useless, but I also think that $400 or more is a ridiculous price for what you get.

Uhhh... yeah. What he said.

My wife has an iPad. She also has an iPhone. She also has an iPod. She also has a Touch. She also has an iMac. She also has a Kindle. It seems to me that, with the exception of the iMac, all of these things have overlapping functionality. What is an iPad other than a super-sized Touch. What does an iPod do that a Touch doesn't do? What does Touch do that an iPhone doesn't do? What does a Kindle do that an iPad doesn't do?

It is preposterous watching her pack for a trip. Her electronics checklist now runs to 22 separate items! On her last trip, she paid nearly $200 in overweight baggage charges. Aaaarrrgggh!

OK, [/rant].

tanstaafl.

I'm not sure what you are dealing with there is an issue with the devices...

When I go on yee-olde business trip, I generally take my MacBook Air, my Droid X, and my Kindle. I could ostensibly ditch the Kindle and just read books from the phone, but the larger screen and damn-near infinite battery life (with the radio turned off) are a winning combination.

These days, I increasingly see people in meetings with an iPad rather than a "real" laptop. If an iPad did everything I needed, that would let me ditch the Kindle as well as the laptop. Very attractive. Sadly, when I'm traveling I'm often working on technical documents, so I need latex, emacs, etc., never mind a proper keyboard.

Jailbroken iPad with a bluetooth keyboard could potentially solve the software/keyboard issues.

But I won't be giving up my notebook any time soon, regardless of where I need to travel. As long as I don't have to walk the streets carrying it in my hands all day, I'm good with it in a bag on a plane or in a hotel.

The complications here are flash capacity, battery life, weight and sun light screen readability.

There is no doubt that lots of people who own an iPhone and an iPod of some sort, where they'd ideally just have the iPhone. With the iPhone currently stuck at 32GB, it "forces" some people to get an iPod as well.

And some people probably own the iPad and Kindle, rather than just the iPad because of the screen. While the iPad screen is often readable in sun light in the UK, I imagine in many other parts of the world it generally isn't.

Then you have the weight issue. For the sort of person who wants to commute with their eBook reader, it might make perfect sense to commute with the Kindle, but have the iPad at home (because of course it can do a great deal that the Kindle can't).

For me personally, the iPhone/iPad/Laptop cover all bases. My iPhone is always with me and is use for smartphone stuff, some reading, music* and podcasts. The iPad** is the primary non-work browsing device and my laptop is what I sit in front of for many hours a day working.

Certainly there is some overlap between the three, but they all serve distinct purposes for me and it is hard to remember how I survived without them *blush*

I expect most people starting from scratch with no devices would choose to buy less devices than they ended up with, there are plenty of people around who have iPods simply because they owned them before they had iPhones or people with Kindles who bought them before the iPad was around.

* I really need a 64GB iPhone to fit all my music on, but not enough to make feel the need to start carrying an iPod as well
** to be fair the iPhone could do everything I use the iPad for, it is just that the iPad does some of them better due to its size when you don't need pocket-ability

P.S. I didn't actually buy the iPad myself, but if it hadn't been bought for me I expect I'd have bought one with my own money anyway

Dixons are selling them for £89 in the UK if you can find them in stock anywhere !!!

Cheers

Cris.

At £60 it might have made and interesting photo frame. But I reckon by the time the iPad 3 comes out early next year you'll be able to pick up an iPad 1 with a knackered battery for <£100, which would be a far more sensible idea, for me at least.

An interesting point I just made to my brother on the phone earlier... I'm not sure if anyone other than Samsung is even selling more non-iPad tablets than HP was prior to this firesale. I doubt Motorola or RIM are selling more than a few thousand each month.

From a financial perspective this move likely makes a lot of sense for HP. It's just a shame they royally fucked the whole thing up from the beginning though. None of the WebOS products had any chance at all. The good news (for HP) is that they may very well pull off this transition the same way IBM did a few years ago. Motorola was saved by Google and it's doubtful RIM will make it until the end of this decade. I give them no more than 5 years unless they dramatically change direction/focus.

I wonder if anyone at Microsoft is laughing about HP's WebOS blunder. In between sobs of the potential loss of Windows licensing opportunity should they exist the PC business...

That does seem a bit extreme, even to me. The redundancy between the iPod, iPhone and iPod Touch seems a bit strange. I could see the iPod and the iPhone since the iPod offers much more storage for pure music.

For me, my breakdown between iPhone and iPad seems to be for these uses:

iPhone: calls, text messaging, camera, video chat, alarm, instant messaging, podcasts, music, GPS, social checkins, reminders, flight status and boarding pass, some games to pass the time, twitter, maps reference, mail, some web browsing, and calendar reminders/game reminders (cursed Eve)

iPad: Netflix, local LAN video streaming, news video streams, books, comics, mail, web browsing, magazines, star maps, photo browsing, maps for reference, pdf and other documents, longer session games, SSH, VPN access to work, twitter, flipboard for RSS browsing, notes in meetings, remote desktop, video podcasts, a way to show someone at work a site or e-mail to discuss, and battery life. Because it can just sit in standby and receive push messages for so long, it's much easier to use for work e-mail when away then it is to wait on a laptop to boot and sync down messages.

Yes, much of what I do could be done on the iPhone, but it's just not the same. The iPad virtual keyboard is much more usable, and with the higher resolution, SSH sessions and remote desktop sessions are also easier to deal with. Comics and books work better too, since there isn't as much scrolling and squinting. In many ways the iPad has replaced what I'd use a small laptop for. The laptop still is useful for a real keyboard, but I could tote around a bluetooth one (no jailbreaking required) to type longer things on the iPad. A larger laptop still appeals to me for mobile gaming (WoW, Starcraft and such), but only when I live near friends I want to game with in person. For now, the desktop computer fills the roll for big games.

Oh, the dedicated book reader part I could see too. While the iPad is nice for night reading due to the backlight, it's not great for on the beach. The weight is also an issue. I may be looking into a small reader (not a Kindle) again soon.

Well, two out of 22 is OK, I guess. I think she got the iPad because her techie friends had them and she didn't want to be left out.

tanstaafl.

I got my TouchPad tonight, updated it to WebOS 3.0.2, and installed the Preware/homebrew stuff.

It looks to me like HP did the right thing by pulling the plug. They gave it the old college try, but WebOS 3.0 on the Touchpad hardware feels about a half-generation behind what you can get from current Android or iOS devices. WebOS really is the Amiga of mobile OSes -- a lot of superior ideas, but just not enough momentum to sustain itself.

It's certainly a capable device for browsing the web and whatnot, and it'll be fine as digital photo frame -- but I do hope the Android port comes to fruition to unlock the potential to do much more with the hardware.

I couldn't. Dixons in Heathrow T5 (I was on my way to Frankfurt) had sold out within 90 minutes of opening; so I sent the wife to a PC World near her office, and they'd just sold their last one as well.

it took 3 days before i finally got a confirmation email telling me HP actually processed my order!

HP is producing another batch, to sell at a loss...

http://h20435.www2.hp.com/t5/The-Next-Bench-Blog/More-TouchPads-on-the-Way/ba-p/68749

This has to be a play to try and get some sort of established tablet user base to make a buyout of the WebOS division more appealing. Or the new CEO really is just interested in burning money for the hell of it.

This is likely to use up parts they've already ordered. It's still going to cost them more money than just abandoning those parts however.

But if they can use this to kick-start a development eco-system, they might have a better shot at licensing WebOS...

that's about the only reason i can think of. of course, with people looking at building android for it, who knows if that will play out.

But that's not going to happen.

Who in their right mind is going to commit real dollars to developing for a dead platform that might have only a few percent chance of one day being reborn? And with a tiny customer base, even after firesale prices?

Development for Android based tablets isn't exactly fairing well and that has multiple companies pouring millions of dollars into keeping it going, let alone Google continuing development and improvement.

Anyone at HP who thinks this is a good idea is completely out to lunch. The only reason to announce such a move is to further damage their stock. Perhaps top executives are all secretly shorting? They're doing a fantastic job of running the company into the ground and it's only getting deeper each day.

The only reason I can still see for licensing WebOS is for vertical market applications. And even then it's a really tough sell, because you'd probably be much better off with the "free" solution in Android for that. HP has done such a fantastic job at tainting this product that I don't know if it has any future at all in anyone else's hands.

That might be what they're planning, but who on earth would develop for the platform when it has such an uncertain future? About the only thing we seem to know for sure is that WebOS, since HP bought Palm, has seemed destined for printers. Are developers really going to write for that? Seems Windows Phone 7 is a better bet these days...

I think the recent trend that most amazes me is the praise/approval some journalists are showing for this move as a tablet business strategy - moving forward!

Some of them even think this firesale is going to upset iPad sales. Um, yeah, and I have a shiny bridge you might be interested in buying. I have no doubt that HP will clear all its stock at the $99 price point, but the quantities we're talking about here are still negligible when compared to the iPad's quarterly cycle - let alone its entire lifecycle.

I've also seen speculated that Amazon is going to enter the heavy loss-leader game with a tablet, trying to emulate early-life console business. Good luck with that. Nintendo got out of that game quickly which kept them alive for the last generation. Both Sony and MS sold at a loss only while working on cost reductions, and while taking a large chunk of titles published through them. For Amazon to even think of doing this they'd likely have to restrict the device to only their store. Even then it's a different ball game.

Cyanogenmod on the Touchpad alpha release: WIN.

The developers say it's buggy, but I'm happy to report that even at this alpha stage, it's very usable. I didn't have much time to play with it this morning before work, but I did get as far as booting up, opening up a few web pages, and installing SlingPlayer (which seems to work fine.) Swiftkey complained about not being optimized for tablets, but seemed to work anyway -- I'm guessing it's just lacking the split thumb-typing mode.

Overall speed is faster than Webos, which was to be expected. They did say battery life is really poor right now, but I rarely use mine on battery for more than a few minutes anyway.

Here's a two-sided argument.

- Android and iOS are the two dominant platforms. Win Phone 7 is a distant third. WebOS isn't on the map. Give it up, it's over.

- The WebOS "platform", such as it was, was pretty much a variant on the HTML5 "platform" we're seeing increasingly these days. A WebOS application and a Chrome application have more than a passing resemblance, if you squint your eyes right.

As such, while I doubt that WebOS will come back in any meaningful way, I would expect many ideas from it to get folded into the behemoth that is HTML5, which may well become a serious player for cross-platform mobile apps (i.e., you write a trivial wrapper around the HTML widget and otherwise ship a very portable app across platforms).

Hey, at least it didn't disappear into the dustbin of history like the software for another device I won't name.

In the phone space, perhaps. WebOS does have a leg up over Android here, it is an OS built from the ground up for touch by finger. Just as iOS, and WP7 are. Android is improving in this regard (3.0 started taking it more seriously and 4.0 is improving), but it has a ways to go to outgrow it's older smartphone roots.

WebOS would have a hard time gaining momentum here due to the dominance of the other strong newer generation mobile platforms. Should be interesting to see if any of the HTC/Samsung types of the world start using WebOS as a possible club against Google if they feel they are losing the control they want over Android.

The touch tablet side is definitely not over. iOS is 90%+ of this market. WebOS is almost as strong as Android in this space fighting over the current scraps. This is in part due to the firesale HP ran. Microsoft isn't even here yet, though they look to be arriving with a pretty serious platform with Windows 8. (I've had some hands on experiences recently). Google and friends show no signs of slowing their attempts, and HP has also commented they may do future tablet hardware. Should be an interesting couple of years in the space.

Huh? Are you talking about having controls other than the touchscreen? Because, unless I'm mistaken, every single webOS device except the most recent one, the HP TouchPad, had a hardware keyboard.

That's actually also the first thing I thought.

Peter

No, I'm talking about the era in which each platform was born, and what input mechanisms were a priority in regards to the design of the OS. The initial Android project started back when the common smartphone/PDA interface was either stylus driven, or some sort of trackball/cursor based navigation.

Android was following those examples for the early designs. The OS was then adopted to a more finger touch friendly setup. Google made it work well enough to keep many folks happy with their phones. And Microsoft seems to be on a similar path in the tablet space, taking their much older Windows core built around keyboard and mice (and later styluses via the Tablet PC projects), and adopting it to finger touch for the more modern tablet. It can work, but it's the difference between reworking part of the OS for a new interface, vs being designed day one for the interface.

Another parallel would be early Windows (non NT) vs Mac OS (non OS X). Windows was just a GUI shell program bolted on top of the DOS OS. Mac OS was from the ground up a GUI OS. During boot with Windows, you got to watch DOS boot first in a text mode console. And if Windows failed to start, it dumped errors into the text console. Mac OS booted always in a GUI, and always presented GUI errors if something went wrong during boot. (This is meant as a high level example view, vs a low level discussion about boot firmware, OS kernels, GUI windowing systems, etc)

This article from a former Google intern helps talk about this in much more detail:

https://plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/VDkV9XaJRGS

That post gets so much wrong... the corrections at the top help but are not enough.

I know what you mean, but you've picked up a very poor example. The startup phase of the Windows and classic Mac OS really weren't that different in practice.

Yes the Mac didn't show you a text console, but when it came to errors it no more GUI than Windows/DOS. An unhappy Mac or a cryptic error number really doesn't count as GUI

Do you have time to point me to somewhere that can properly answer why Android always feels lagger then iOS and WP7 UI wise? I thought the corrections by the Square CTO and the response from Dianne Hackborn was decent, but I wonder why you say it's "not enough".

This isn't meant as an attack on Android. It's mostly to try and answer the "why" question in my mind, as I do know some people who have chosen iOS over Android purely based on the input differences. My suspicion has leaned towards the difference between a tightly coupled system vs a more "open" one meant to run on all kinds of various hardware, thus sometimes suffering from the lowest common denominator issue. The response from the Square CTO hinted a bit in this direction (the LCD need for both hardware and software rendering until everyone is at 3.0 or above), along with the quality of developer tools being another factor.


Very true. The main point though is that it helps to know what the priorities are between different projects. Knowing this can help make much more informed decisions on what path to pick.

My iPhone 3G seemed snappy when I got it in 2008. By the time I retired it in 2010, with iOS 4.0, it was awful.

My Droid X, when I got it in 2010, was much better, but was flakey. When Motorola finally put out Android 2.2 for the thing (late 2010), it finally worked as it was supposed to work, and it worked quite well and snappy. Then, slowly, as I've added stuff to the phone, it's clearly gotten more laggard now than it was previously. Sometimes rebooting the phone fixes these problems. Sometimes not.

I'm intending to get a Galaxy Nexus, once they become available on Verizon, unless Verizon somehow manages to screw it up in a significant fashion. (*Sigh*) If that's the case, then I'll probably wait until March, when I can escape Verizon without paying an early termination fee (but I'd need to double-check my paperwork), purchase a global, unlocked GSM version of the phone, and then bug Rob for the top ten ways of getting reasonable GSM service.

I didn't experience this first hand (due to the 3GS upgrade), but saw it on Tony Fabris's phone. Apple definitely slipped quite a bit when they tried to cram 4.0 onto 2007 era hardware.

On the WebOS side (bringing the topic back a bit), I've found it interesting to watch how the input manager does always seem to be alive. I've not had a case where the screen misses a tap (due to WebOS showing a visible little ripple effect), but I have had plenty of times on the Touchpad where the apps (both 3rd party and bundled ones) are just dead for a while. That to me says they did focus on touch heavily as a priority, but didn't balance that priority properly with the task of ensuring the overall system also remains responsive.

Good postmortem from the folks over at The Verge:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-inside-story-pre-postmortem

Lots of bad timing seemed to kill it. I was previously unaware of all the talent they managed to have under their roof. WebOS really could have been a significant and good alternative in the current smartphone market had a few key things gone differently.

If Apple had never entered the market. I believe that's about the only thing that could have given Palm any chance whatsoever.

Agreed, but I would word it another way. More like: "if they hadn't screwed up every step after the announcement." Seriously, they really fumbled every possible move of this thing. They took forever to release the phone, their marketing strategy was askew from the get-go, and then the phone was way too small and FAR too cheaply made/underpowered. Aside from that, they did everything right

I really wish we could see what might have happened if they had put forward the best possible product. I think it would have made for a strong third competitor to Apple and Google, and would have certainly killed Windows Mobile/Phone 7.

The part they did right was leveraging WebKit and building everything around it. They were, indeed, way ahead of the software curve. I'm not entirely sure whether they got the security story right for separating apps and the like (I'm looking forward to Open WebOS so I can take a peek). And sure, the article details how they were screwed on the hardware, extra screwed on relationships with the carriers, and were paid no favors by management.

Still, the WebKit business was indeed slick. And, now that Duarte is on the Android team, you can see his handiwork. Android 4 notably includes his app switcher / task killer.

An ecosystem based solely on apps built on a web framework was and is, overly optimistic and flawed. It's just not where most developers want to be, nor does it offer the best of breed solutions the same developers have been offering on iOS for example.

As much as Google and a couple of others want to push the web, it is not the future of all apps.

But I don't think that had anything at all to do with the failure of the brand and platform.

Oh, absolutely, their failure had far more to do with their business maneuvers than anything with the software architecture.

Still, what really grabs me from the article is the description of how awful their original software was ("five lines of code to center text on the screen") versus the seeming elegance of punting everything to WebKit, which they would presumably need to support well, regardless, so they might as well extend it for systems things. They were even smart enough to initially build what appear to be JavaScript hooks toward their original native functions, so they didn't have to toss all their old code.

And, sure enough, a Palm Pre had really nice graphics. It looked pretty. Too bad about everything else...

Yep - that's something I think MeeGo had going for it. HTML5 apps would have been trivial to support as the low-end entry point.

Then use the same Qt framework underneath Webkit to support both native and HTML5 apis.

And today, an awful lot of Android and iOS apps are really a thin native shell around an HTML widget. This makes apps easier to port across platforms, among other benefits.