5 ms·

Is it crazy that I still think webOS is the best mobile OS of all time? The pre and pixi were just... underpowered

noman-land 4y ago
I agree wholeheartedly. If it was able to be fully baked it could have been revolutionary. The unified chat view that showed your conversation history across multiple chat platforms was amazing.
zeroego 4y ago
Not crazy in my opinion. So many of the things webOS did back in like 2008 the iPhone just recently implemented. It was way ahead of its time. I really wish it was still around.
hajile 4y ago
We're getting close to 13 years since webOS launched and we still don't have anything that comes close to the UI functionality it offered.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  I really thought it would be the future... Just goes to show that the best doesn't always win.
- justusthane 4y ago
  As someone who never used it, what made it better than today’s mobile OSs?
  - explorigin 4y ago
    In design, they paid a lot of attention to making common actions available with your free thumb so you could navigate most apps with one hand. App-switching, context menus, device operations were all swipe operations. Having a hardware keyboard made it a bit chunky but didn't feel bad in your pocket because it was so smooth. Also the hardware keyboard provided a true tactile feel so you could even type out some messages without looking at your screen nearly as much as you need to with on-screen keyboards.
    - rozap 4y ago
      Man, I miss phones that were designed for human hands. Everything now is way too big to use one handed.
      - astrange 4y ago
        When phone designers read posts like this, they try selling small phones again, and then nobody buys them. (A variant is saying smaller phones are better for women who have smaller hands. They care even less because they have purses.)
        rozap 4y ago
        I would buy it. Sure, it wouldn't sell like the next iPhone Whatever, but I think there is a healthy niche.
  - codepoet80 4y ago
    A lot of what's in today's mobile OSes came from webOS. Cards for multi-tasking. The full-screen gestures introduced with the iPhone X basically came exactly from webOS. Samsung copied its Touch2Share years later. It even had some advanced sync features that no one has yet to properly copy. Now-a-days, Android and iOS kinda take turns copying each other and mobile webOS is mostly a relic -- but it was from a time when phones didn't exist to suck up your data for advertisers, so it remains charming and delightful.
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      A lot of the WebOS UI/UX DNA ended up in Android generally and in Material Design specifically because Matías Duarte went to Google as Palm imploded. He was a VP at Palm and is now VP of design at Google.
      - dylan-m 4y ago
        Or that was the hope, but unfortunately a lot of what made WebOS good was the synergy between his team's excellent design thinking and the clean, practical, well designed platform underlying it. Android is a mess because it tried to reinvent the wheel everywhere from day one, and then Google took over. Which means barely 15 years later it carries multiple Windows' worth of legacy garbage. They've done some lovely UI design, but they have been unsuccessful making that type of work anything more than skin deep.
        cmrdporcupine 4y ago
        Oh sure, I agree in general. Though I think I'd have a hard time going back to WebOS now. The memory is likely better than the reality.
  - hajile 4y ago
    It was revolutionary in how it was just the modern OSX UI on your phone. App menu was always on the upper-left side. Settings were on the upper-left. There was a dock at the bottom for most-used applications and an app drawer to hold the rest sorted into tabs. CMD+Space to search your system was "Just Type" from the "home screen". Their unified notification feed is something I haven't really seen iOS or Android even attempt. I once heard the iOS app paradigm was the equivalent of having a house with only doors facing to the outside. Going from your master bedroom to the master bath requires leaving the bedroom entirely, walking around the outside until you find the master bath and then going in. When you multitask on OSX, do you switch applications by minimizing your app and opening it again from a desktop icon or from the app drawer? Nope. You use expose/mission control to see what's open on your current screen. You can also swipe left/right to view other virtual desktops. Your running applications (rather than your desktop) is your default view. Same thing with webOS. Swipe up for expose where you'd see your current fanned out set of cards (one per app). Swiping left/right would show different sets of cards that you could create/rearrange based on whatever task. Just like OSX, those tabs would be LIVE rather than paused background stuff. The default view with webOS was also application-first rather than desktop first. iOS and Android encourage having EVERYTHING "open" even though anything past the last handful of apps will probably have to reload anyway. The result is that finding anything useful in that deck of cards is very hard. webOS encouraged sorting that list and keeping it limited to what you were actually using. While all the differences may seem small, but together, the overall experience feels much different. HP's second (third?) CEO of the year killed the whole palm division when an investment and licensing webOS could have made HP/webOS into what Google/Android is today. They were finally coming out with decent hardware designs with bigger screens and without the dedicated keyboard. Their in-progress Mochi design would be around a decade old today, but when you look at it, it has an aesthetic that I think most people would find very refreshing today. https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/5/5585216/team-behind-webos-releases-mochi-redesign-open-source https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/5/5585216/team-behind-webos-...
    - elzbardico 4y ago
      HP is the quintessential example of death by Harvard Business School thinking.
elteto 4y ago
I bought a pixi the moment it came out... the OS was incredible for the time. And it was so pretty. Unfortunately, the battery lasted less than half a day and it almost burn a hole in my pocket with how hot it constantly was. The hardware was absolute crap. I returned it after a few days.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  The Pixi was poorly spec'ed. The Pixi Plus was a winner (for the time)
lhball 4y ago
To this day nobody does notifications as well as WebOS did. IMO the hard-headed refusal to make a touch keyboard even optionally available also contributed to their demise.
- unwiredben 4y ago
  It was coming... the WindsorNot design was just a slab with no keyboard, IIRC. https://www.webosnation.com/windsornot-webos-slate-smartphone-never-was https://www.webosnation.com/windsornot-webos-slate-smartphon...
  - hajile 4y ago
    I picked up an HP Touchpad during the fire sale and remember being surprised by how good the keyboard was at the time compared to an ipad or android tablet -- especially given how those had been on the market so much longer.
- qiller 4y ago
  In the phone land at least, TouchPad was a nice tablet
  - hajile 4y ago
    That dual-core 1.2/1.5GHz Scorpio was blazing fast and the 128-bit NEON unit kept them going quite a bit longer than the competing A8 systems.
heavyset_go 4y ago
I'm eternally bitter that webOS died and that we're stuck with Android and iOS now.

I agree wholeheartedly. If it was able to be fully baked it could have been revolutionary. The unified chat view that showed your conversation history across multiple chat platforms was amazing.

zeroego 4y ago

Not crazy in my opinion. So many of the things webOS did back in like 2008 the iPhone just recently implemented. It was way ahead of its time. I really wish it was still around.

hajile 4y ago

We're getting close to 13 years since webOS launched and we still don't have anything that comes close to the UI functionality it offered.

guerrilla 4y ago
I really thought it would be the future... Just goes to show that the best doesn't always win.
justusthane 4y ago
As someone who never used it, what made it better than today’s mobile OSs?
- explorigin 4y ago
  In design, they paid a lot of attention to making common actions available with your free thumb so you could navigate most apps with one hand. App-switching, context menus, device operations were all swipe operations. Having a hardware keyboard made it a bit chunky but didn't feel bad in your pocket because it was so smooth. Also the hardware keyboard provided a true tactile feel so you could even type out some messages without looking at your screen nearly as much as you need to with on-screen keyboards.
  - rozap 4y ago
    Man, I miss phones that were designed for human hands. Everything now is way too big to use one handed.
    - astrange 4y ago
      When phone designers read posts like this, they try selling small phones again, and then nobody buys them. (A variant is saying smaller phones are better for women who have smaller hands. They care even less because they have purses.)
      - rozap 4y ago
        I would buy it. Sure, it wouldn't sell like the next iPhone Whatever, but I think there is a healthy niche.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  A lot of what's in today's mobile OSes came from webOS. Cards for multi-tasking. The full-screen gestures introduced with the iPhone X basically came exactly from webOS. Samsung copied its Touch2Share years later. It even had some advanced sync features that no one has yet to properly copy. Now-a-days, Android and iOS kinda take turns copying each other and mobile webOS is mostly a relic -- but it was from a time when phones didn't exist to suck up your data for advertisers, so it remains charming and delightful.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    A lot of the WebOS UI/UX DNA ended up in Android generally and in Material Design specifically because Matías Duarte went to Google as Palm imploded. He was a VP at Palm and is now VP of design at Google.
    - dylan-m 4y ago
      Or that was the hope, but unfortunately a lot of what made WebOS good was the synergy between his team's excellent design thinking and the clean, practical, well designed platform underlying it. Android is a mess because it tried to reinvent the wheel everywhere from day one, and then Google took over. Which means barely 15 years later it carries multiple Windows' worth of legacy garbage. They've done some lovely UI design, but they have been unsuccessful making that type of work anything more than skin deep.
      - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
        Oh sure, I agree in general. Though I think I'd have a hard time going back to WebOS now. The memory is likely better than the reality.
- hajile 4y ago
  It was revolutionary in how it was just the modern OSX UI on your phone. App menu was always on the upper-left side. Settings were on the upper-left. There was a dock at the bottom for most-used applications and an app drawer to hold the rest sorted into tabs. CMD+Space to search your system was "Just Type" from the "home screen". Their unified notification feed is something I haven't really seen iOS or Android even attempt. I once heard the iOS app paradigm was the equivalent of having a house with only doors facing to the outside. Going from your master bedroom to the master bath requires leaving the bedroom entirely, walking around the outside until you find the master bath and then going in. When you multitask on OSX, do you switch applications by minimizing your app and opening it again from a desktop icon or from the app drawer? Nope. You use expose/mission control to see what's open on your current screen. You can also swipe left/right to view other virtual desktops. Your running applications (rather than your desktop) is your default view. Same thing with webOS. Swipe up for expose where you'd see your current fanned out set of cards (one per app). Swiping left/right would show different sets of cards that you could create/rearrange based on whatever task. Just like OSX, those tabs would be LIVE rather than paused background stuff. The default view with webOS was also application-first rather than desktop first. iOS and Android encourage having EVERYTHING "open" even though anything past the last handful of apps will probably have to reload anyway. The result is that finding anything useful in that deck of cards is very hard. webOS encouraged sorting that list and keeping it limited to what you were actually using. While all the differences may seem small, but together, the overall experience feels much different. HP's second (third?) CEO of the year killed the whole palm division when an investment and licensing webOS could have made HP/webOS into what Google/Android is today. They were finally coming out with decent hardware designs with bigger screens and without the dedicated keyboard. Their in-progress Mochi design would be around a decade old today, but when you look at it, it has an aesthetic that I think most people would find very refreshing today. https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/5/5585216/team-behind-webos-releases-mochi-redesign-open-source https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/5/5585216/team-behind-webos-...
  - elzbardico 4y ago
    HP is the quintessential example of death by Harvard Business School thinking.

elteto 4y ago

I bought a pixi the moment it came out... the OS was incredible for the time. And it was so pretty. Unfortunately, the battery lasted less than half a day and it almost burn a hole in my pocket with how hot it constantly was. The hardware was absolute crap. I returned it after a few days.

codepoet80 4y ago
The Pixi was poorly spec'ed. The Pixi Plus was a winner (for the time)

lhball 4y ago

To this day nobody does notifications as well as WebOS did. IMO the hard-headed refusal to make a touch keyboard even optionally available also contributed to their demise.

unwiredben 4y ago
It was coming... the WindsorNot design was just a slab with no keyboard, IIRC. https://www.webosnation.com/windsornot-webos-slate-smartphone-never-was https://www.webosnation.com/windsornot-webos-slate-smartphon...
- hajile 4y ago
  I picked up an HP Touchpad during the fire sale and remember being surprised by how good the keyboard was at the time compared to an ipad or android tablet -- especially given how those had been on the market so much longer.
qiller 4y ago
In the phone land at least, TouchPad was a nice tablet
- hajile 4y ago
  That dual-core 1.2/1.5GHz Scorpio was blazing fast and the 128-bit NEON unit kept them going quite a bit longer than the competing A8 systems.

heavyset_go 4y ago

I'm eternally bitter that webOS died and that we're stuck with Android and iOS now.