Comment by megaduck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by megaduck | Hacker News Reader

Whoever buys Palm is getting a real prize. First of all, they get the entire Palm patent portfolio, many of which Apple is infringing upon. Palm's been doing the smartphone thing longer than almost anybody, and they've built up quite a bit of IP along the way.

Palm also has sales channels with the three biggest US carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint), as well as carriers in Europe like SFR and O2. Bell (Canada) gets tossed in for flavor.

Finally, there's WebOS. While WebOS launched rather immature, it's been developing incredibly rapidly. The OS in its current state is incredibly capable, and a joy for both developers and users. It's more usable than Android, more capable than the iPhone (even after OS 4), and blows Blackberry out of the water in almost every respect.

What Palm's missing is solid hardware and enough runway to get developers online. They won't have all their developer tools up until this summer, and it's questionable whether they've got enough cash to get past fall.

I hope that whoever acquires them doesn't kill WebOS. I'm an extremely satisfied Pre owner, and I dread the prospect of having to jump to Android or the iPhone (shudder).

Couldn't agree more. The last 2 years, I've used iPhone, Android, and for the last 2 weeks, WebOS (Pre).

WebOS is limited in some ways but the entire package comes off well for the end user. I find it a refreshing alternative to Apple and Google's platforms. It would be nice to see WebOS survive.

An alternative to buying Palm as patent arsenal might be to go the other route: buy it and open it up more...maybe see if NZ is serious about eschewing patents and move the HQ there. Sure, that's dreamy talk, but I hope an acquirer thinks a bit more outside the box than just accounting for patent war. Even though Android is open, its complex. WebOS seems to strike a nice balance.

As far as needing to jump platforms again. It seems that Verizon and a few smaller distributors are in process of pushing out the excess Pre/Pixi inventory. The reason I bought my Pre is because Verizon was giving them away, 2 for $49 (plus $29/month data plan for 2 years). For what its worth, Verizon is locked into providing support for this new set of users for the next 2 years.

Is WebOS honestly that good? The last I heard that I was paying attention to was jwz giving up on his for performance reasons (http://jwz.livejournal.com/1108212.html)

I know there's a lot to like about it; I loved (in my brief exposure) the cards metaphor, and I imagine that development could be quite nice, but have they solved the issues he refers to?

[disclaimer: I have had a brief play with a Pre, but you can't get them in Australia. I would have considered getting one].

JWZ had a Pre when WebOS was kind of half-baked. They've made significant gains in responsiveness since then, and solved most (all?) of the things he complained about.

That being said, the system doesn't feel as 'instant' as the iPhone or a fast Android phone. However, you can often get things done faster than competing platforms because the workflow is so streamlined.

Moving to a 1Ghz processor like the Snapdragon would probably bring responsiveness up to parity with other systems.

That's encouraging, thanks.

One area where WebOS is still miles ahead of even iPhone OS 4 is notifications. I was actually a little stunned that Apple didn't even address the issue last week: Notifications in iPhone OS are incredibly primitive; they exist only as modals with no history. You get one, it interrupts what you're doing, and if you get ten, you only see the last one and there's no way to review the other nine.

WebOS, on the other hand, displays notifications peripherally and in parallel, it consolidates and organizes them by application, and even has two levels of hierarchy for initial and persistent alerts. It's an order of magnitude more powerful, yet elegant enough that it would be at home on any Apple device.

"You get one, it interrupts what you're doing, and if you get ten, you only see the last one and there's no way to review the other nine."

Not the case, in my experience. Generally, they pop up one after the other, right when you're about to tap on one, and then you have to either dismiss each one separately, or open the application responsible for the most recent one and hope for the best.

Notifications on iPhoneOS are the single worst user experience, and I can't understand why Apple hasn't yet fixed this ridiculous and annoying problem once and for all.

Oddly, they don't get the remnants of Be and BeOS (whatever those might be by now). Be was owned by the other half of Palm that spun off to sell the Palm OS.

With the Newton trumping the Palm in date, I would assume, barring Apple transferring those patents, that Apple would have some low level patents in this department, but given the age (and my age too) the Newton may have been over 20 years ago now so the patent period may be past.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com