So… I wasn’t one of those to hop on the Apple bandwagon with the iPhone and the iPad. I appreciate Steve Jobs and Apple’s vision, but as an IT professional I have always appreciate systems where I can tinker, and Apple has never allowed for that. Quite frankly, I look back at that old breakthrough Macintosh ‘1984’ ad and, fast-forwarding to today, Apple starts to look like the open-source upstart taking on some characteristics of that ‘big brother’ on the screen.
Instead, I went with a system that a lot of you out there will laugh at. I went with the Palm Pre…not because of the phone itself, which frankly feels more like a toy than many phones, but I was impressed with the operating system, WebOS. Now I know that Palm has had its heyday where Palm Pilot was the breakthrough device (ancient history at this point). But the WebOS they created is really a sleeper, in my opinion. Sure, the iPhone universe of applications and the Android Market completely bury it in the quantity of aps available. But honestly, even with the much smaller number of apps available for WebOS, I stil have all I need, including Angry Birds!
By the way, for all of you iPhone folks out there…how many of those gazillion apps available do you actually have, much less actually use? An how many of those apps are multiple attempts at doing the same thing? Like how many restaurant tip applications, or clock applications, and obscure games do you really need?
Anyway, Hewlett-Packard just recently bought Palm for $1.2 billion – specifically for the WebOS operating system! I know that HP is not the most visionary company, and I know they haven’t really been a player in the phone market, but we will soon hear the announcement of the HP TouchPad using the WebOS operating system. HP had been 
working on pairing their Slate tablet device with the Windows tablet operating system. When WebOS came along, HP cancelled that project (smart move!) and moved forward with the new operating system, which was specifically designed from the ground up for a touch device.
You can find a number of industry articles comparing iOS, Android, and WebOS for tablets, and although iOS and Android have advantages in a number of areas, WebOS holds it’s own with these two in these comparisons. The one area that all these comparisons rank WebOS on top is Multitasking, which is rock-solid. WebOS uses a unique ‘card’ metaphor that leaves each application fully available and running in a rotating set of on screen ‘cards’. On my own phone I’ve been able to effortlessly have a tethering session running, while taking a phone call, while looking an address up, while having a web session up. Imagine how that will look and work on a larger form factor device with more memory and improved versions of the WebOS.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think we can count HP out on this one. They’re putting a lot into this effort, including an announcement that every HP computer sold will be loaded to dual boot with both Windows and WebOS. That’s a bold move for HP, but they’re determined to get more visibility for WebOS.
In the end, if we’re honest, a lot of these decisions come down to almost ‘religious’ preference. I’m personally eager to see how the new device stacks up when it hits the market. All we know for sure is that this whole world of digital work and communication is constantly under change.
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