WebOS has always been the most impressive mobile OS IMO, it's just never had a competent owner or decent hardware to back it up. I hope they do something with it.

This, of course, is coming from one of the suckers that paid $599 for a Touchpad on launch day, so take it with a grain of salt.

Coming from one of the suckers who bought a Palm Pre two years ago and is still using it (gotta love contracts!), I see nothing redeeming about WebOS. WebOS was Palm's Potemkin village -- a shallow attempt to convince a larger, dumber company that they were relevant enough to warrant a buyout, by creating the appearance of a technically impressive achievement.

Apart from technical merits, of which there are only a few and they are debatable, one of the values of an operating system is the commitment of the company behind it -- and with clowns like Palm and HP who stopped issuing updates only months after launch, I say fuck them and any carrier who allowed these pieces of shit to pass technical acceptance.

The only reason I've hung onto this thing for 2 years is because I'm determined to make this the phone that loses Sprint my business.

I happen to own a Palm Pre 2 and I have a completely different perception. It's light, small and responsive and the way you use it, the just-type interface, the cards thing, is very natural.

It's really sad.

You should try a more popular mobile OS that hasn't completely failed in the market, like WP7 ;)

Not yet, but be patient. It will fail.

It was the first mobile OS that handled running multiple applications in a crisp clean way. Notifications were done very well. These are two very key components. Combine that with a hardware keyboard and an easy/common development platform.

It was totally mismanaged.

I was thinking about the Pre3.. Now I'm stuck with the Android or switching carriers for an iPhone. Neither are pleasing choices.

> Why would anyone license something that's basically stillborn even with a company as big as HP pushing it?

Remember the word license here has multiple meanings ... I read it as a coded message to the other players - start getting ready to "license our patents" or get ready to be sued. In the world of patent MAD the only way to sue and not get sued back with patents is not to have any products. And look what HP is doing - basically announcing the spinning of any product that might be a target and then sending a coded message about "licensing" to its competitors. My tin foil hat might be over-sensitive, but reading between the lines this sounds all too close to be true. When you tie the timing in with Googorola - valuing patents at $510k each - you can imagine this might just have pushed them over the edge to a completely different monetization strategy for WebOS.

I have the feeling that, if they are getting out of the PC business, they're probably getting out of the tablet business as well.

If the hardware were $150, someone will figure out how to put honeycomb on it

Maybe HP can slap Android on the TouchPads they haven't sold? :)