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I have never really liked any of the major players. I used to run WebOS on a Pre3 for a long time. Now I have a Jolla C, but it isn't my main phone because of i

I have never really liked any of the major players. I used to run WebOS on a Pre3 for a long time. Now I have a Jolla C, but it isn't my main phone because of its poor battery life, so I also use an Android phone. The saddest thing here is those alternative OSs innovate a lot. WebOS in particular was years ahead of both iOS and Android in terms of UX (after all they had Matías Duarte on board... [1]). Sailfish is more interesting technically, in that it was probably the fastest OS to do "zero to non-trivial native mobile app" on thanks to its development tools (the Qt environment, with QML, a standard build VM...). I backed the tablet as well, but I don't hold a grudge. What they are trying to do is incredibly hard, failures have to be expected. If you want to meet the developers from Jolla, I think they have a BoF room at FOSDEM every year. I sat in to listen for a while in 2017, it was pretty interesting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matías_Duarte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matías_Duarte

diminish 8y ago
Would you say that latest WebOS has still features which are years ahead of for both current IOS/Android. I mean are there features which aren't implemented in some form in by those two mobile OSes?
- catwell 8y ago
  I don't use WebOS anymore so I don't know its current state, but I doubt it because it's not the same team working on it anymore. Back in the early '10s however it had things like usable widgets on the home screen, application cards, gestures instead of buttons... which all landed in the two major OSs years later.
- als0 8y ago
  There was a mechanism whereby you could transfer the current web page (or video) on your phone to your tablet, simply by placing the phone on top of the tablet. This was back in 2011. I think the Handoff feature in iOS is similar (although not proximity based). The HP WebOS devices had wireless charging. It took many years for this to properly appear again in the market.
- hajile 8y ago
  Yes! The webOS UI from 8 years ago is still way better than the latest from Android or iOS today. The apps and implementation may not have been that great from a performance perspective (even then), but the UI was/is absolutely better. If you want a specific feature, I'd point to first-class multitasking and cards, real menus, good combination phone/tablet UI via Onyx (I'm looking at you Android), JustType, Synergy (all your services working together instead of being separate islands in your phone), gesture zone, etc.

diminish 8y ago

Would you say that latest WebOS has still features which are years ahead of for both current IOS/Android. I mean are there features which aren't implemented in some form in by those two mobile OSes?

catwell 8y ago
I don't use WebOS anymore so I don't know its current state, but I doubt it because it's not the same team working on it anymore. Back in the early '10s however it had things like usable widgets on the home screen, application cards, gestures instead of buttons... which all landed in the two major OSs years later.
als0 8y ago
There was a mechanism whereby you could transfer the current web page (or video) on your phone to your tablet, simply by placing the phone on top of the tablet. This was back in 2011. I think the Handoff feature in iOS is similar (although not proximity based). The HP WebOS devices had wireless charging. It took many years for this to properly appear again in the market.
hajile 8y ago
Yes! The webOS UI from 8 years ago is still way better than the latest from Android or iOS today. The apps and implementation may not have been that great from a performance perspective (even then), but the UI was/is absolutely better. If you want a specific feature, I'd point to first-class multitasking and cards, real menus, good combination phone/tablet UI via Onyx (I'm looking at you Android), JustType, Synergy (all your services working together instead of being separate islands in your phone), gesture zone, etc.