
News of HP trying to spin-off its paper-thin-margin PC business and killing WebOS devices shocked the PC world yesterday. The reason for the Touchpad's demise was more than performance, but The Next Web is reporting it was a problem, and WebOS engineers knew it.
WebOS engineers went as far as to port the OS to an iPad 2 and the results seemed to add insult to injury. WebOS ran nearly twice as fast on the iPad 2 compared to the TouchPad according to the report's source. The constraints of the Touchpad's hardware reportedly stopped the WebOS team fron innovating "beyond certain points" early on. The WebOS team even wanted the Touchpad and Pre smart phones gone before they were released.
The WebOS team deployed WebOS in Mobile Safari as a web-app, did the same on the Touchpad with its browser, and saw the same speed increase on the iPad over the Touchpad as they did porting WebOS over to the iPad natively.
While the WebOS team was able to port the OS over to the iPad, it is a difficult process as WebOS is specifically designed for the Snapdragon Qualcomm chipset. If HP intends to license out WebOS to other device manufacturers like it has mentioned it has plans to, streamlining this process is a must.
But, as HP has mentioned in their recent press releases, their plans for the future of WebOS aren't clear right now and that is possibly the worst thing that could happen. Not having a plan in a marketplace that evolves as quickly as mobile computing does is a death knell.
Source: The Next Web



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