Android User Spends 60 Days In WebOS Land 137
An anonymous reader writes "About six months ago, however, I began to wonder about how the other mobile products had grown. When the HTC HD7 crossed my path a little while ago, I decided to abandon my Nexus S and live among the Windows Phone folks for awhile. The experience was fun, but I eventually went back to my Nexus S. About a month later, I was presented with the opportunity to repeat the experiment, only this time with a Palm Pre Plus. With the HP Touchpad on its way, I wanted to get a feel for how WebOS worked, explore the differences, and take a look into the community that was still loyal to WebOS."
Comparison? (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem with WebOS (Score:3, Insightful)
The main problem with WebOS is the same main problem with iOS... it only runs on one platform. As such, it is doomed to failure. Android has become the Windows of the smartphone world. The hardware platform manufacturer is now nothing but a commodity.
Re:Comparison? (Score:4, Insightful)
While there are some text editors and such, a big issue has been about QuickOffice and when it will be made available for true document editing(right now we have viewing). There are a number of apps out there for WebOS, perhaps not in the hundreds of thousands, but WebOS has enough apps for most people, and only those who are more concerned with how many apps there are, rather than "is there enough for my needs?" will really find the App Catalog too small.
Now, in reality there are two programs that give you access to an application catalog(store), the first comes out of the box, and has free and paid applications. There is a second called Preware that will act like a second app catalog for homebrew applications. This was touched on in the article without being named. Preware gives you access to tons of patches and tweaks, and in general will supplement the official app catalog well enough for most people. Since there are not a TON of apps overall, we don't have 2000 different fart apps and garbage like that, where the numbers are padded with duplicate pieces of garbage. If you then clean up the app catalogs/stores between platforms, and then look for the USEFUL apps, you won't be too disappointed with what is available for WebOS, but there ARE some things missing that would force some people to skip the platform right now. This is where getting more publicity will help fill in the gaps since it isn't TOO difficult to port an app from iOS to WebOS.
The real key is that if you are looking to see if WebOS will meet your needs, ask the community at www.precentral.net in the forums.
Now, some of what was missing from the article...
Without downloading apps, WebOS is designed to sync your phone against either a Gmail or Yahoo account over the air, no need for cables to sync to a computer as long as you have cellular or WiFi data working. Facebook and other social networking are also included right out of the package, and your "friends list" will be merged with your contacts in your address book so it is all neatly connected together. In general, the level of integration between your different communications methods is very good, so you go to your address book, and you can e-mail, call, send a SMS/MMS message to the person. The only downside out of the box is that some chat features for social networking are not set out of the box. There are patches to take care of this though.
WebOS is currently split in three main groups, and there is a fair bit of compatibility going up in versions.
The original Palm branded phones are generally on WebOS 1.4.5, with the Palm Pre 2 running 2.0.1. There was an upgrade that was only made available to users of O2 in Europe for WebOS 2.1 on the Palm Pre Plus, and the developer community has come up with a way to legally allow users to hack this new version on to their own Palm Pre and Pre Plus phones. So even though 2.0 or 2.1 is not officially available for the Palm Pre and Pre Plus for most people, it CAN be done if you can handle a bit of tinkering.
Then you have the HP Veer, tiny as it may be, it is running WebOS 2.2. Note that apps for 1.x will run on 2.x for the most part. The Touchpad comes with WebOS 3.0 which will generally run apps from WebOS 1.x and 2.x.
When the Pre 3 comes out(whatever the name may end up being by the time it does), it will come with either WebOS 2.2, 2.3, or 3.0, at this point there is speculation all over the place. The Pre 3, if it comes out SOON, will be fast enough to grab some attention and probably generate more app development. The real key is how long HP is going to wait, or why they have not released it yet. 1.4GHz with 512MB of RAM with a 3.6 inch screen plus slide-out keyboard SHOULD be enough to get some users if Verizon and AT&T don't hide it and intentionally kill sales. We shall see what happens.