R.I.P. webOS

by admin on Aug 19th in Hardware Recommendations, Palm Pre

It is truly a sad day.  HP has announced that it will discontinue the sale of webOS phones and tablets.  This is probably very frustrating to those who bought the new HP Tablet in the last couple of months…and they are still advertising them on TV!  As a long time Palm user, it is sad to see the last flicker of the once strong Palm enterprise being snuffed out.  I had actually thought that HP buying them last year would push the further development of webOS and see it become a major player in the smartphone and tablet environments.

For those who haven’t used the webOS, it is a very smooth, easy to use, truly multi-tasking OS.  While the reviews of the hardware it ran on (Pre, Pixi, etc) weren’t very good, the reviews of the OS itself were always very positive.  I purchased Palm Pres for nearly everyone in my family when they first came out.  Even my less than technologically savvy wife was able to use it with little or no effort.  The problem for my teenage daughter was the very ‘fragile’ hardware the always seems to break (a reason to always pay for the phone insurance!).  She got a new Android phone a few days ago, and while it is a gorgeous phone, with a brilliant Samsung screen, she was very disappointed in the OS compared to her old Pre’s webOS.  The multi-tasking, the ‘flicking’ of apps and emails, and other simple processes were now replaced with more ‘computer-like’ actions.-which led her to say, “I miss webOS!”

I know the OS field in phones seems a bit crowded, with RIM, iOS, WinMo 7, and Android, but I feel we’ve lost one of the most innovative OS’s that the field had to offer.  I’ll have to replace the rest of my Pre’s very soon, and I guess I will go with Android–maybe if Sprint gets the iPhone soon enough, maybe even go that way (ha, ha…just kidding).   Actually, I just want my old Palm Treo back….

Maybe the 200,000 HP Tablets that Best Buy is stuck with will be very cheap (under $200) soon…maybe they will show up on the next Woot-Off…I’ll buy three…

Thanks for the memories, Palm!

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