Will they keep WebOS?
Not to mention that there are currently no currently officially selling WebOS devices (except for a few straggling phones in the discount bin), nor plans for new ones.
And, when your competitors are Android, WP7, and iOS, getting over the vicious cycle of "no developers making apps which means no people are buying apps which means that no developers are making apps..." is just too much. Even Android was struggling with that and still is on the tablet side even with the Google juggernaut behind it.
Plus, even in printers and lower end devices and phones like that, WebOS is overkill. Samsung's Bada and Android are crowding that market too tightly, not to mention Symbian.
Maybe we'll see WebOS as an "instant boot" option on a few HP PC models for which it was already in development but that doesn't really count.
There's no future for WebOS. It's dead. When your competitors are Microsoft, Google, and Apple, and they already have entrenched hardware and software products in the same market that are innovative and being actively developed, and are directly competing against yours, and are having far more money pumped into them, and have thriving ecosystems, and haven't been officially been killed off, you may just be best off going home.
In my opinion, it's much better than iOS for tablets and larger devices (the perfect TV?) but the clock is ticking. Every day HP wastes with decisions like "should we kill one of our largest sources of revenue?" Apple is right next door developing amazing products for tomorrow like Siri.
[1] http://www.tmcnet.com/topics/articles/229026-hp-remains-bigg...
This was demonstrated both when the WebOS application layer received a 2X performance boost when ported to WebKit on iOS, and again when Android was ported to the TouchPad hardware and was found to be quite a lot faster than WebOS.
It's quite clear that it is a fundamentally flawed architecture without a future. It's too bad; there's some interesting stuff going on in the application layer, but the underlying OS is a complete turkey.
People tend to dismiss WebOS without ever touching a device. Yes, my Pre2 is not as fast as my Nexus S but guess what, for my daily tasks of emailing, web, agenda, evernotes and ebooks it is GREAT! The OS has a better experience and the development framework rocks. Enyo is wonderful, I wish it was open source.
You speak of a flawed architecture, I just see a beautiful system with a wonderful paradigm (the cards) that is aesthetically pleasing and a joy to develop for. If I could get my hands on a Pre3 or a TouchPad, I would buy it instantly but unfortunately, they are not available here.
I think they should rip out whatever kernel they're using and replace it with BeOS, which has wonderful real-time and multitasking behavior.
Of course, even if this is all wrong, it’s not like WebOS will cost that much money. It’s like Amazon picking up a book at the bookstore, it looks interesting, you probably won’t ever read it, but it looks pretty and doesn’t take up space and you can send it off to the thrift store in a couple of years.