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I haven't tried the Pre myself, but if jwz's experiences aren't unique (most likely), it's really a shame. The specs don't look so bad- is it webOS dragging it down?

It looks like Motorola's Droid is the best hope at this point to drive some innovatin' by competing at the level of the iPhone.

Or is there another contender I've missed? Is the HTC Hero/G2 worth looking at?

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I'm really disappointed to learn this. I've been really curious as to how Palm succeeded to make their apps based on javascript so fast as to be even comparable with iPhone apps.

Turns out they haven't, they've just got really low standards as to what's good enough to ship. Really sad, I was hoping they'd be able to offer some strong competition for Apple.

If all webOS applications are coded in JavaScript (so I've heard; didn't look into it too much), the VM overhead could well be dragging things down. Even V8 is ten times as slow as Java or C#, and v8 isn't even available for ARM.

Yeah, the problem is that every single app is written in JavaScript. It works better if you open the apps you use frequently and just leave them open. Then the page remains rendered and is much faster.

Interestingly, it would be possible to code native apps on it via browser plugins. Some parts of WebOS do use this it seems, but only to interact directly with the hardware.

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