WebOS: What Went Wrong?

19.08.2011
HP announced , which includes the HP Veer 4G, the HP Touchpad and the yet-to-be-released HP Pre 3 smartphone. The death of WebOS devices is sad, yet unsurprising news. The entire journey of the WebOS has been marred by pitfalls since the very beginning--and things only got worse over time.

WebOS's Troubled Start

WebOS has a special place in my heart and I've always wanted it to do well. The Palm Pilot was my first foray into the smartphone/PDA world so when I heard rumors in late 2008 that Palm was going to revive its platform, I was excited to see what ferating system would look like. Palm OS, which was found on some of the earliest PDAs and Smartphones, like my Pilot, the Treo and the Centro, did not have the features or aesthetics to compete with the iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry OS and even Windows Mobile.

Fast-forward to the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show: Palm staged a huge media event and unveiled the operating system and a new phone to go with it, the Palm Pre. Palm seemed ready to take on the iPhone with Jon Rubenstein at the helm, the ex-Apple engineer who helped create the iPod. WebOS seemed to have it all: a gorgeous user interface, touch-friendly navigation, multitasking support, an apps ecosystem, unique messaging features and even iTunes support. At the time, there was pretty much no smartphone phone that could match the iPhone when it came to apps, multimedia and user-friendly design. Android was hardly a threat with only one US phone available, the G1, which was clunky. The Palm Pre looked slick, too. With its full touch display and slide-out QWERTY keyboard, it hit that sweet spot between the iPhone and the BlackBerry. The term "iPhone killer" was certainly thrown around a lot at its launch.

But there were right out of the gate, starting as early as the day after the splashy launch. First off, Palm did not allow the media to touch or use the Pre. We could watch the Palm product people use the Pre, but we couldn't even hold the hardware in hand. While a few company's do this with pre-release hardware, it is a big risk to do this with a flagship product. How are reviewers, like myself, supposed to make any kind of judgment on the phone? It seemed like Palm wasn't quite ready to show off the Pre.

The Long Wait for WebOS