"WebOS was a Hail Mary attempt by Palm to save the company after the failure of Palm OS 6, which was under development for 5 years before being canned. In a panic, they took a Linux kernel and WebKit and spat out an OS in a matter of months."
Yeah, this is certainly true. All us Palm users got endless emails that there was a new OS coming, and then we saw Palm sell the entire OS off, and buy it back, and yeah, total trainwreck.
JWZ also was one of the first people I read talking about how WebOS was better than iOS or Android for the reason j_col spells out: a better development system since it meant writing in JS and Web like technologies.
(FWIW, in the 30 days I had one, I never found it slow, or had it crash, or even found the phone app slow. I went from there to my first Android, the Hero, which was widely acclaimed at the time and in fact so slow it could not answer the phone reliably before seeing the call roll over into missed-call-landia. I returned the Hero and went back to my Treo until Nexus One came along.)
Yeah, this is certainly true. All us Palm users got endless emails that there was a new OS coming, and then we saw Palm sell the entire OS off, and buy it back, and yeah, total trainwreck.
JWZ also was one of the first people I read talking about how WebOS was better than iOS or Android for the reason j_col spells out: a better development system since it meant writing in JS and Web like technologies.
(FWIW, in the 30 days I had one, I never found it slow, or had it crash, or even found the phone app slow. I went from there to my first Android, the Hero, which was widely acclaimed at the time and in fact so slow it could not answer the phone reliably before seeing the call roll over into missed-call-landia. I returned the Hero and went back to my Treo until Nexus One came along.)