Friday, March 11, 2011

What is WebOS?

WebOS is a mobile operating system created by Palm in 2009 and at that time was slated to be the next major competitor in the smartphone space along with Apple, Google, and RIM. WebOS was the newest incarnation of Palm software and had a lot of promise with multi-touch features, multi-tasking capability, over the air software updates, and a great user interface. Palm debuted WebOS with the Palm Pre smartphone on Spring in June 2009.

As promising as Palm’s future was, the Palm Pre family of smartphones fell way below expectations enabling HP to purchase Palm outright in April of 2010. It is generally understood that HP purchased Palm for its WebOS operating system and we are now seeing the benefits. HP has recently announced that they will be releasing WebOS in all of its desktops  in 2012, and will be coming out with WebOS powered tablets and phones as well. So what does this all mean for you?

HP is building a new ecosystem of products that is poised to offer every aspect of your computing experience with its smart phone and future tablet and computer offerings. Web OS is not the first to do this with Apple releasing its iOS mobile operating system for tablets and smartphones and its Mac OS X software, which is slowly but surely becoming more iOS-like. In truth, Microsoft long had this ecosystem in place with its Windows software on both desktops and tablet PC’s, and its Windows Mobile software on smartphones (but we know how that turned out). And if Google’s Chrome OS ever comes out to the general market, they could be a player in the ecosystem market as well. In any case, this bold move of adding WebOS to its desktop machines adds yet another ecosystem in the mix, which could push consumers to first decide on which camp they belong in before they make a technology purchase. My current setup of a Macbook with a Blackberry phone may be a thing of the past.

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